Re-Deanimator
by David N. Brown
Summary: Breaking up is hard to do... and a zombie apocalypse doesn't help. An original project. David N. Brown resides in Mesa, Arizona.
1. Meg and Greg

**Back around the time the "Walking Dead" comics first came out, I started my own project of the same name, which ultimately became my (relative) best-selling novel, and then wrote a short-story sequel (the first draft of which is here). Since then, I have been thinking on and off about trying to do some kind of larger-scale follow-up, on the lines of a "reboot" that could mix things up with characters and settings. This vignette represents a "demo" that I decided would work as a one-shot and might be appreciated here. I won't go into a full explanation of the "setup", but if you know cars, it should be easy to figure out.**

Meghan lived in the suburbs of a modest city in the desert. Her friends called her Meg, and she lived with Greg. She rose from the couch in the morning, as she had for the last five mornings, and confirmed that the light switch still did not work. She emerged from the den into the living room and went to the kitchen, where she discovered that the faucet did not work either. That was new. She went upstairs, past the photo of Greg, Greg at the office party, Greg at the wheel of his new Audi Quatro, Greg shooting his .454 magnum, and Greg with his big muscular arm thrown lazily around her neck, almost eclipsing her almost-new Chevette behind them.

Meg rapped on Greg's bedroom door. "Greg," she called out, "the water's out." She opened it. Greg was gone. She glanced at the dresser, and confirmed that the keys to the Audi were there. She stepped back into the hall, and saw that the door to the bathroom was closed. "Greg, I said, the water's out." She turned the knob; the door was latched. That was when she heard the thumping.

It was strikingly regular, one thump, a pause, and another thump, repeated, over and over. Meg pressed her ear to the door, and listened. Now, she could hear an unmistakeable swishing between thumps, and a hint of momentary scuffling: "**Thump**- swish- _scuff_- swish- **thump**..." She thought of a pendulum, and at that very moment, she heard the creaking, a sound just like some metal fixture, bending under considerable weight. "Greg," she said flatly, closing her eyes and pressing her forehead against the door.

Meg's eyes opened at a change in the rhythm of the sounds: "**Thump**- swiishh- _thump_- swish- **thump**- swish- _**rrriiiiippp**_..." She lurched back at the crash and jingle of the shower curtains being torn down. The creaking grew louder, and then there was a tearing screech exactly like the shower head being wrenched right out of the wall and a crash exactly like a body falling into the tub. For a moment, she stood completely still. Then she backed up to the bedroom.

She found the magnum and two boxes of ammunition, exactly where she knew they would be. She scooped them all into her old overnight bag, shoved out of sight in the closet. On a whim, she grabbed the key to the Audi. She was gathering things in the den when she heard another crash. She scurried back into the living room and looked up the stairs.

The bathroom door had been knocked open with single blow, forceful enough to splinter the wood and lodge the knob in the plaster. At the top of the stairs stood Greg, in his business suit, with the shower head hanging from Meg's nylons around his neck. His face was almost black, and his head lolled like a badly stuffed scarecrow's. Yet, his gaze seemed to turn directly toward Meg, and with strides as stiff and even as a windup tow, he began to descend the stairs. She drew the magnum as she backed up to the door, and took aim, no doubt badly, at Greg's face as she reached the bottom. She held her aim, as best she could with a gun whose weight alone was enough to strain her wrist, while Greg turned ponderously toward her. He stood there, seeming to stare, with his head lifted just a little higher and straighter. Finally, Meg put the gun back in the bag. "Okay," she said, "you can keep the Audi." She cast the keys at his feet, and as she made her exit, she saw him bend over to pick them up.

Meg had to cover some distance to reach the carport where the Chevette was parked, past two cul de sacs of identical two-story, two-unit townhomes and through a little park. On the way, she saw three wrecked cars and a dozen shuffling figures, one of which definitely turned in her direction before she went around a corner and out of sight. She used a shortcut that required vaulting over a low wall and dropping another foot to the asphalt. The only car in sight besides her little reddish-orange hatchback was a station wagon with a crumpled, blood-stained hood and the driver's-side door torn halfway off its hinges. No bodies were in sight.

Meg dropped her keys trying to unlock her car, at the unset of sudden shakes. Her hands steadied as she put the key in the ignition, but began to tremble worse as she turned the key again, and again, and again. The first time, nothing happened. The second produced an abortive rattle. At the third try, the engine gave an apologetic cough before falling silent. Meg's hands were shaking hard enough to make the key rattle in the ignition as she turned it yet again. The engine rumbled to life but then died with a protracted wheezing. She looked out the window, at the station wagon, The window frame of the door was bent. Her hand went still. She turned the key, and kept her hand on the ignition as the engine started, began to cough, and then worked back up to a steady rumble.

Meg made a tight U-turn in reverse, scraping the station wagon in the process and bumping into a support beam. Then she accelerated, approaching top (though still modest) speed as she peeled out of the parking lot and around a corner onto the street. She swerved to avoid a shuffling figure, only a child, but there was no taking chances with such a small car. As the car rounded another corner, the child turned belatedly and reached out for where the car had been. Its head lifted, as if staring, but any observer who met its eyes would have seen clouded lenses in no shape to see much of anything.

The Chevette was closing on 80 miles per hour as it roared toward the gates of the townhome complex. It braked and finally swerved for Greg, who stood in the middle. The showerhead was gone, but the torn nylons were still around his neck. His darkened face had lightened to a reddish purple, enough to make his features readily discernible. As Meg gazed out, her hands began to shake. It seemed to her that what she saw was indeed the Greg she knew. It occurred to her that his expression, especially, was the same he had worn on the night she made a discrete trip to the emergency room. As Greg reached for the door handle, the window went down, and a perfectly level gun barrel slid out. "Selfish ass," Meg said. She had no awareness of firing the gun. She only felt the wrenching ache of recoil, and saw Greg drop with a half-inch red spot on his forehead and a substantial hole in the back of his scalp. As he struck the asphalt, the keys to the Audi tumbled from his hand.

After a moment's pause, Meg opened the door and scooped up the keys.


	2. Nowhere, Fast

**This is the next chapter in an original storyline. I was inclined to make this a new story and leave "Meg and Greg" as a one-shot, but I concluded that it would be more convenient for readers to keep everything together. This chapter is setting up for the entrance of the story's hero, and also further developing my ideas for a "revisionist" version of the zombies in a "retro" setting.**

Meg saw the smoke rising from the gas station from miles away. She groaned and looked at the fuel gauge of the Audi Quattro. "Should have kept the Chevette," she muttered.

When Meg saw the solid mass of dark, shuffling shapes spread across the highway in the distance, she knew that the gas station would have done her no good even if it had been operational. She turned around, and after a short distance, turned east, onto a two-lane back road that had seen better days when the last Democrat was elected president. She had heard that campers, prospectors, and off-roading daredevils frequented the general area. That would explain the sign, which said, TO NOWHERE FAST.

She looked at the fuel gauge again. The Quattro had decent gas mileage, and it had a generous 20-gallon fuel tank. But it had been less than half-full when she had driven it out of her ex's garage, and the circling, idling and multiple four-wheel-drive detours getting out of the city had drained it fast. Even travel on the open roads was slow, and the car was giving far less than its theoretical 20 mpg. The gauge was down to the last gallon or so, and dropping.

She swerved to avoid a shuffling shape in the road, not soon enough. The collision crumpled the bumper and damaged a headlight. The shuffler went under the wheels, and she heard scraping on the undercarriage. Then the shuffler was receding in the rear view mirror. She looked away when the twisted shape raised an arm. Then she saw another line of shufflers across the road ahead, not close but not far. She took the next turn-off, onto gravel. Her eyes lingered on the sign: SERVICE STATION 5 MILES. The 3 MILE sign marked a turnoff onto a dirt road. Her gas lasted just long enough for the car to die within sight of the sign that said 1 MILE.

At the turnoff from the road, twenty-one shufflers from a passing mob turned aside down the gravel track. Seven of them broke away to explore the dirt road. Within half an hour, they passed the Audi. Four moved on, but three lingered, examining the car with vague interest. One pulled the door handle. Another picked up a rock and swung. The rock bounced right out of the zombie's hand, leaving an inch-wide spiderweb in the glass and setting off an alarm that was audible back at the turnoff. Back at the gravel track, eight shufflers turned back toward the dirt road. Closer at hand, the third shuffler at the car looked up. Down the road came a looming shape. It was big and boxy and half-shrouded by dust, which did not obscure the bright gleam of something like a giant silver Cheshire Cat grin.

A piercing cry, something between a wail and a whistle, carried even further and clearer than the car alarm.

There was one last turnoff, a dirt path of about ten yards, to reach the service station. A weathered green sign showed `Pete's' in bleached white cursive. Beneath it was a newer but still visibly faded circular sign for GULF oil. As Meg trudged into the station, she stepped over a body in a station attendant's uniform, sprawled face down next to a New Mexico Highway Patrol car. A crow squawked at her, before returning to feeding on the exposed brains of the deceased.

Scanning about for any sign of gas, Meg stepped right between two strange creations that looked like oversized antique gumball machines, each topped with a circular sign with the "Pete's" legend. She whirled about at a strange screech, to see the crow flapping away. Then she looked at the objects at either hand, and recognition dawned. Even so, she wasn't sure until she saw the hoses. Mom had told her, once, about visible gas pumps. Her mother had seen them on a trip down a country background, and thought the sight passingly strange and quaint. The trip had been her honeymoon.

Meg found a pump handle and gave it a try. There was a wrenching scrawnk that made her jump back. She tried again, and the noise was not repeated. She continued to pump, watching gas well up into the big glass cylinder on top. She was up to the five gallon mark before it occurred to her that she would need to find a can.

Meg went to the station's narrow main building, and looked in the door. There was a single room, with a lobby area for people to sit, a counter with a meager selection of candy and post cards, and an antiquated Pepsi-Cola machine shaped like a baby blue headstone. At the back was an office with the door ajar, and a short passage to an exit in the back. She noted a sign that said, "Toilet in back. Ask attendant for key." She averted her eyes from a mass of crimson that had been a woman sprawled on the checkered linoleum of the lobby. Then she jumped back as a shuffler slammed against the glass. It was a man in grungy clothes, with numerous lacerations and a bloody head wound. The shuffler slammed against the door again, making it rattle in the frame. Meg started to tremble, until she looked at the handle on her side. Large bas relief letters read, PUSH.

Meg made her way to the garage entrance, past a VW Baja Bug parked with one wheel halfway onto the paved walk. She paused to look back at the parking lot, and tensed. She could see past the patrol car, where the body had been... but the body was gone. What was more, three more shufflers were making their way up the path, while a fourth shuffled on by. She drew the magnum, and fired at the nearest. Her shot missed the target completely, but felled the shuffler still on the road. She took aim more carefully, lining up the sighting piece as best she could on the shuffler's constantly lolling head. Just when she felt ready to fire, something plowed right into her. Her shot went wild, and she let out a scream as she recoiled. But the shuffler that collided with her was not pressing the attack, but flailing strangely on the ground. It was clearly the same `body' that had been lying on the car. A green badge bore the name "Art" in the same cursive script as the station signs. It looked very much as if the shuffler was still trying to walk upright.

That was when Meg noticed the smell. She looked to the pump, and swore. Her shot had clearly grazed the glass tank, probably glancing off a bent support rod. The tank was essentially intact, but it had sprung a slow and steady leak.

The garage had bay doors on both ends, both open. Its two births were occupied by a stripped-down '32 Ford and an early-'60's Dodge pickup on a raised hydraulic lift. On the far side of the garage, an engine hung suspended on chains. Meg stayed on the near side, ducking as she passed a door that led to the main building. With hurried rummaging, Meg found a steel jerry can at the back. She noticed a clipboard hanging from a nail with a semi-legible scrawl: "Jon- Borgwar (scribble) Gal(smudge) Co. no good. Call Mo(scribble). Phil." Finally, she paused to pick up a hefty old monkey wrench that looked promising, when she heard footsteps around the back.

There was no question in Meg's mind that it was not one of the shufflers she had seen so far. Indeed, the sound was not shuffling at all, but long and measured strides. For a moment, she began to hope that it was human, though she knew better even before she peeked out the doorway. This one wore a police uniform, and walked with stiff goose steps. The motion was radically different from the shufflers' dragging perambulations, but just as rhythmic and even less human. She drew the magnum, but pressed back to the corner and waited, watching the strider jerk out of sight and then listening as its footsteps receded into the yard behind the station. She was just exhaling in relief, when she felt something slam against the wall behind her. She lurched back, as two even more powerful thuds came through the wall. Tools rattled, a thin cloud of dust puffed from the wall, and the clipboard clattered to the floor.

Meg knew it could be only one thing: Somehow, a shuffler in the main building on the other side of the wall knew she was there, and it was trying to come through the wall. For a moment she wondered if it might succeed, but that fear eased: The wall might be thin, but it was solid concrete. But then, the real problem was if the shuffler finally used a door. She holstered the magnum, picked up the wrench and the can and ran.

Art was still on his back, but his writhings were more purposeful, like an upside-down turtle trying to right itself. Meg jumped over the loathsome thing. Behind her, there was the sound of the rear door of the main building opening and slamming shut. The first of the newcomers stood in front of the pumps; a single blow of the wrench took care of it. She hefted the wrench as another shuffler approached, moving a bit faster than usual straight at her- until it turned right and shuffled past the garage. She dropped to her knees in front of the pump, trying to stay clear of the growing pool of gas. The fuel made a pattering sound as it poured into the can. Some splashed out, and she set down the wrench to steady the nozzle. She heard the sound of a shuffler, going around the main building, and looked over her shoulder to watch the corner. She was still looking when a leathery hand touched hers.

Meg stared into the ruined face of the shuffler she had bludgeoned. It stared back with one remaining eye that seemed, for once, functional and focused. Meg's eyes flicked to the tank; it was down to the last gallon. The lifeless hand gripped her wrist, and began to squeeze. At last, she could bear it no more. With her free hand, she snatched up the wrench and struck. The blow landed across the back of the shuffler's head, with a crunch of fractured bone accompanied by the popping of dislocated vertebrae. The shuffler stiffened and rolled over, clearly and truly lifeless, yet its mouth opened in the contortions of a death rictus, and an eerie, bloodcurdling, ear-splitting and bowel-wrenching cry came forth. Then, as it pitched to the asphalt, Meg was jerked forward in its death grip. The pump nozzle dropped from her hand, and the can fell over, spilling more gas to mix with the shuffler's blood. The shuffler's wail ended in a rasping wheeze, but from every direction, identical cries rose to answer it.


	3. Where's Phil?

**Introducing a character who was never meant to need introducing! Disclaimer for gratuitous found-object violence (I'll take feedback on how much really wants to see) and gratuitous smack talk. Incidentally, for people unfamiliar with firearms, a 20-gauge shotgun is_ smaller_ than a 12-gauge.**

Meg hastily snatched up the gas gas can, saving the greater part of the gas- probably about a gallon. She then retreated to the front of the main building. The shuffler that had passed her by was coming back, in a kind of jog like a toddler trying to run, and the one around the corner was coming faster. Even Art managed to roll over and begin to crawl. She crouched at the corner, using the opportunity to screw the cap on the can. Then, just before the shuffler came into view, she shot upright and swung the wrench. The blow caught the shuffler across the jaw, and it went sprawling on its side. Meg was surprised to see that the shuffler was not the one she had seen inside, but another in the uniform of a service station attendant. It came as a further surprise when she looked at the badge and read the name "Dwayne". Then, before she could do anything decisive to the fallen shuffler, the one she had been expecting came straight through a window behind her. She pulled her self free, leaving the shuffler straining against the steel window frame. But she left the can behind, and she had a number of cuts on her arm. As she inspected her wounds, she saw a shallow but unmistakeable bite mark. With strange detachment, she drew the magnum, and looked down the barrel

"That'd be a bit premature, Colleen," a voice spoke in a heavy cockney accent. She looked back to the corner, and saw what in that moment was a more startling sight than any shuffler: A black man, with hair starting to go to gray, dressed in the regalia of a geologist or prospector, complete with a French Foreign Legion-style hat and a large rock hammer in his hands. "For un thing, that's a bit big for close-in work, innit?"

The black man glanced at Dwayne, who was up on hands and knees, Art, who had made his way to the asphalt, and the one-time daredevil still straining against the window, but he turned his attention first to the shuffler from the desert. As he strode to meet the shuffler, Meg got a better look at him in profile, and saw that, apart from the color of his skin, he did not look much like any black man she had ever seen. His nose especially had a hooked shape that made her embarrassed to think immediately of a Jew. He wore a light shirt that covered his arms, but the wide-open front and sleeveless undershirt beneath left no doubt that he had plenty of muscle to go with his wiry frame. He had not one but two shotguns slung across his back, but he made no move for either as he sized up the shuffler, a man in exactly the kind of shorts and tank-top that marked a 30-something yuppie trying to go back to nature. "Roighta," he said. "So you tried out the aerobics and whatnot. I s'pose you kept in decent shape. But you still go ta the same place." Then his shirt and the headdress of his cap swirled as he swung, and swung again.

Meg edged to the black man's side as he jerked the point of the hammer out of the base of the shuffler's skull. "What's your name?" she asked in a stage-whisper voice.

"Carlos," he said. He wiped the hammer with a rag he tossed aside and finished, "Wrzniewski."

"Ah," said Meg. "Ahh... where are you from?"

"Little bit o' everywhere," Carlos answered. He twirled the hammer. "I just got here. As a rule, I'da taken more time 'fore comin' out like this, but you just made an exception."

"Well, I suppose I should be glad you did."

"Aye. There's plenty o' people who wouldn'ta. Now what can you tell me 'bout them?"

"There's one in the back, a cop. I suppose you saw him." Carlos nodded. "All the rest that I've seen are the ones you see here. Except... There were four that wandered in behind me. I shot one over there on the road, and I... I don't know where the other went."

"Aye. Nobody can ever keep track of all of them. Any sign of others? It coulda been a sound, or something disturbed... or just something lying around that didn't look like it belonged to the others."

"I've been looking at the names on the uniforms," Meg said. She pointed to Dwayne, who was back on his feet and looking toward them. "That's Dwayne, evidently, and the other one's Art. I saw two more names on a clipboard in the garage- Jon and Phil."

Carlos looked at the pumps. "Roight, an' if Pete's the one who put those in, he's prob'ly long gone. But, you never know. First things first..." He hefted the hammer and grinned at the approaching shuffler. "Howdy, Duh-wayne. What's up?" He gestured profanely downward. "Not you, anymore." Dwayne stretched out his arms. "That a _soft _spot, aye?" said Carlos. "What are you gonna do 'bout it, boit me?" He eyed a jaw that looked like a sack of bricks. "Oh, roight- ya can't!"

Dwayne made a short lunge, his hands going straight for Carlos's throat. The black man- or whatever he was- backed up, toward the garage. Meg raised the wrench, but he waved her back. Then she called out in alarm: Carlos's strategic retreat had taken him in reach of Art, who came plowing across the gravel driveway with an oddly effective porpoise-like undulation. Carlos flashed Meg a grin as he sidestepped Art's lunge and in the same motion came at Dwayne from the side. The blunt end of the hammer caught him across the ear with an audible crunch. The shuffler fell straight back, striking the back of its head on the corner of the concrete island for the pumps with an even louder crunch. Carlos had already sprung for his other foe. Dropping to one knee, he pinned the crawler and drove the point of the hammer into the joining of brain and spine. Art convulsed and wheezed out an abortive "EEE" when Carlos pulled the hammer back out. "Nay worries," he said as he wiped the hammer on Art's coveralls. That was when the shooting started.

Carlos instinctively dived for the nearest cover, which was the intact pump. Then he ran like hell, straight through a volley of shots that ended in a click as he dived out of sight on the far side of the garage. Inside the garage, the striding cop goosestepped forward, continuing to pull the trigger of a big Colt 1911 pistol. He finally halted in his path, directly beneath the hydraulic lift, and after little tentative probing managed to eject the magazine. With a little patting at his hip, the strider took out another one and tried to put it in, backwards. The magazine slipped from stiff fingers, and the strider promptly bent down to pick it up. Carlos peered around the edge of the door as he unfolded the stock of a compact 20-gauge military shotgun. The cop was still bent over, fumbling with the gun and magazine. Then there was the unmistakeable click of the magazine sliding into place.

The strider straightened, or rather would have if not for descending hydraulic lift. Incredibly, the strider pushed back, like Big John shoring up the mine shaft. Even more incredibly, there was an audible whine and hiss of strain from the hydraulics, and it did seem that the descent of the lift slowed. A little. But clearly, the strength of the reanimated was not a match for massive hydraulics plus the sheer inertia of a truck on a platform big enough to support it. Carlos lowered the shotgun and watched the inevitable. The strider gave a final shriek, almost indistinguishable from the hydraulics, cut short by a grisly crunch. He looked across the garage and gave a respectful nod to Meg, who stood at the lift's simple control box.

Suddenly a scream came from the shadows, and a scuffle of feet. Carlos brought the shotgun to bear, but the suspended engine was in the way. Instead, he threw himself against the engine and shoved. The engine swung like a pendulum, and the shuffler speed-scuffed straight into it. Carlos stepped back and fired straight up, and the engine came straight down. He stepped closer and leaned forward to survey the damage to the shuffler pinned beneath, when the pickup door opened.

Carlos pivoted immediately and snapped off a slug at a figure in a station attendant's uniform. It was a clean miss that took out a chunk of the Ford's windshield frame, but still the attendant staggered and dropped, presumably wounded, stunned or simply thrown off-balance by shrapnel. They always were shaky on their feet, and sometimes they fell over for no reason at... Carlos pumped the shotgun and pivoted again at the crash of the engine hitting the garage wall. The pinned shuffler had all but thrown the engine aside, but it clearly was in no position to take advantage of its freedom. Hands scrabbled at the floor, but the legs only twitched feebly, and there was hardly enough left of its pelvis and abdomen to begin to sit up. In the second or so it took Carlos to size it up, the Ford suddenly rolled back as if in reverse. He turned yet again, and fired point-blank down the throat of the shuffler who had shoves the vehicle aside.

"This is Jon," he said after a glance at the name tag. "So where's Phil?"

Meg shrugged, and then started at yet another impact behind her. "What the hell," she said, not quite shouting, "do they see through walls? And why's it after me, anyway?"

"They do that, sometimes," Carlos said as he took his hammer to the cripple. He attended to Jon, too, taking no chances. "Whatever they've got for senses seem to work best on the living human. They can be literally blind- I'm pretty sure they all are- and not show even a blind man's skill navigating a room, and yet I've seen 'em go for straight for guys I didn't know were there. An' sometimes I see a bunch gang up on just one guy. A couple times, I saw 'em do it to the same guy. Then there's another thing...

He made his way to the door that joined the garage to the station. "Just about everybody still 'round has at least one story about one of those things that just homes in on one particular person and stays on the trail. Not just in a chase, not even just in one area, but over days or even weeks, and ranges of many miles. Me, I never seen it, least not that I could attest to m'self." He finished reloading his weapon, but then folded the stock and shouldered it. "But once, I'm with that guy I just told you 'bout, right after we first run into each other. We stop, an' I get out my binoculars an check on a bunch comin' up behind. Then without even looking, he describes one in particular, and he starts telling me details even before I can make 'em out. He's seen it before, no question. He says he's been seeing `her' behind him, now an' then but regular, over the last two weeks an' what he reckons to be more'n ten thousand miles. He's sure it was his kid. Most all of them say something like that. But then, how many people see a thing like that wi'out it stickin' in the mind?"

Meg shuddered, and not at the impact on the other side of the wall. Carlos took out his other gun, a 12-gauge double. "You get it, right? If it's onto you, then it's staying with you. So if you stay there, it stays right where I can get to it."

Meg nodded, then said, "Mr. Wrnz-ns- Carlos? Why are you doing this?"

He looked at her, and seemed to ponder. "I do it because they are not us, and I don't think they ever were. I do it because everyone thinks they're stronger than us, an' I know they aren't. I do it 'cause they always win, an' it's only because the best of us do nothin'." He hefted the double in one arm, and in the other hand, he twirled his hammer.

"Carlos?... _What _are you doing?"

He grinned. "Something." With two blows of the hammer and one swift kick, he knocked the door open and charged through, with the shotgun raised and hammer held high, point-first. Then things happened very fast.

The office door opened at the padding of a shuffler going into high gear, and the shotgun went off. Carlos swore loudly and foully, and followed up with a louder curse when the hammer lodged in bone without coming out. Then there was the heavier tramp of the enraged shuffler in full charge,. The double went off again, and Carlos let out a steady stream of semi-intelligible curses as he was slammed against the soda machine. He rallied with a grunt that announced a hard shove, and the shuffler went back far enough to catch the butt of the double before the weapon clattered on the floor. Carlos shouted exultantly and pumped his 20-gauge, but then a chair was swung or flung with a crash, and the backup weapon in turn went skittering out the door into the garage. With an unearthly screech, his adversary charged. There was a crash of bone against metal, and a jangle of coins. A thud, a groan of an opening door in the machine front, and another thud as the door slammed shut again. Glass bottles clonking, clattering and breaking, fluids sloshing, spilling and foaming. The beginning of another cry, cut short by a strange "schlonk". Then another metallic thud, and another, and another, louder and louder, and then- fizzing?

In an instant, Meg snatched up the shotgun and dashed for the door. Carlos stepped in her way, grinning. The only thing she could see behind him was a modest but steady geyser of foaming soda. "Want a Pepsi?" he said, holding up a bottle. "Because I sure wouldn't count on getting another one." Meg shook her head, and stepped back. Carlos came out, dragging the body of a final attendant with his hammer still lodged in its ear. With one motion, he extricated the hammer and flipped the body. "And, this would be-?"

"Pete... Junior," Meg read.

Carlos frowned. Meg pumped the shotgun, ejecting a shell already in the chamber, and scanned the shadows. "Okay, gi' me that," Carlos said. He followed, reaching for her, as she stalked into the garage. "C'mon, you ahn't even holdin' it right! Fo' Chrissake, at least let me show ya how t'do up the stock!"

She elbowed him back, scarcely giving him enough heed to be annoyed. An electric thrill of hypervigilance filled her, and she felt guided by some unguessed sense. Indeed, she was already traversing the shotgun when a shape in a pinstriped uniform suddenly stumbled right into her sights. She smiled as she pulled the trigger, at the very moment Carlos slammed her against the Dodge. The shot went wide, and the figure belatedly cried, "Don't shoot!"

Meg limply handed the gun off to Carlos, who looked plenty unhappy himself as he addressed the cringing newcomer: "Phil, I presume."


	4. Indian Joe

"Wow," said Phil, "I was starting to wonder if anybody was still out there. Hey, can I get you anything? I know where there's some food..."

"Where were you?" Carlos said sternly.

"There's storage sheds in back, an' old Pete's place," said Phil. "I've been keeping time in an old trailer, out in the junkyard. They don't come back there much, though there's this crazy cop comes by sometimes."

Carlos waved to the Dodge on the lift. "The cop isn't going anywhere any more. Hold on... you said crazy. Don't you know what's going on?"

"I heard some stories," Phil said guardedly. "I didn't know what to think. Nobody did. Then a couple weeks ago, that Bug drove in, a woman with a guy who was busted up, and the cop came when Junior called for help. I hardly saw anything. I was busy trying to handle this crazy back order... Somebody wanted a transmission part for this completely obscure European model, the _company _that made it hasn't existed for, like, thirty years ago. Obviously, the owners should have been scrapped years ago, but Jonny told me, it's not our job to tell the customers what to do... Anyway, I heard the screams. I was in here, and Jon came out, jumped in that truck and told me to raise the lift and get in. So I did, only Jonny wouldn't let me in. Then I saw Art run out of the garage for the cop's car, and the cop came out and just _shot_ him. So I just ran like hell..."

"Probably the best thing you could have done," Carlos said. "Hold on. Trouble." Down the path came five more shufflers.

"What are they?" Meg asked. "I mean, really."

"Your guess is good as any," Carlos said. "But if you're asking for a name, `kudlak' is good as any. It's a word from Yugoslavia for what we would call a vampire. That's where all this started, or at least the first place where the rest of the world heard about it. The Yugoslavs gave two stories, one on top of the other. First they said that there were `panics' in isolated areas where people still believed in kudlaks: Bodies were bein' dug up an' destroyed, just like in the movies, only it was getting' out of hand. Then they announced that this time- and who knows 'bout the other times?- dead bodies really were getting up, walking around, and attacking the living. Not that anybody believed 'em, until bodies started walking out of the morgues in Budapest."

He paced to the left, drawing a kudlak after him. "The first reports said they could be killed by a shot to the head. They were wrong, and anybody who knew anything about the brain should have known better. The human brain is kinda like that VW. The steering- what you'd call human intelligence- is up front. But plain old regular people survive major trauma there all the time." He struck the kudlak across the temple. It fell face down, and after a short time, started to rise. "That's 'cause the power- balance, heart beat, reflexes- is all in back. Most every animal that's ever lived has got by on hardly nothin' else, an' so can they." He drove the point of the hammer into the base of the skull. "Bottom line, you hit them just anywhere in the head, then sure, they fall down. Hit 'em in the hind brain or the spinal cord, an' _then_ they stay down."

Meg shuddered involuntarily. She suddenly experienced the most vivid recollection of a moment that had seemed blacked out of her consciousness: Aiming the magnum at Greg, pulling the trigger, seeing the spurt of blood... from his temple.

The rest of the shufflers went straight for Carlos. Meg reached for her magnum, but Carlos only grinned and twirled the hammer. As the nearest stretched out, a voice Meg had never heard before called out in words she had never heard before either. The shuffler turned its head, to a man of at least 50 with a face that could only belong to an Indian. The Indian spoke again, quieter but still loud and no less firm, repeating one sentence or so over and over again. Meg could not guess what language the words were from, let alone what they meant. She might have taken some comfort in knowing that the handful of ethnologists who had heard a few meager snatches of the same tongue had been equally at a loss to comprehend or even classify it.

The point of Carlos's hammer caught the shuffler in the ear. It dropped immediately. The rest shuffled indecisively, first toward the Indian and then toward Carlos, while the Indian went through more languages, including a snatch of one she thought she recognized (in fact, correctly) as Navajo. "If you don't get the brain stem or the spine, the ear's the next best thing. There's little bones in there, and they work like teeny little gyroscopes. Take out even one ear, and balance is shot." He drove the point of the hammer into the back of the skull. "That's what happened to the one that was crawling around. He did better than most; usually, they don't even make it upright again."

The Indian had got to Spanish: _"Su es muerte! Vaya con los muertos!"_ Then English: "You dead! You belong dead! Go to the dead!"

Meg stared, and Carlos gave her an understanding look. "You think this is crazy?" he said. "I'll tell you what's really crazy: _I've seen it work_." He cheerfully struck down the hindmost, jerking it back with the point in its brain like a shepherd hooking a sheep. Meg sprinted to the Indian's side as he drew the shufflers down the path.

"You! Hey you!" she said. "Over here! I'm talking to you!"

The shufflers came faster. The Indian gave her a venomous glare. _"Quiet! No talk to dead!"_ Then he thrust something into her hand and ordered, "Hold this." She was surprised enough to comply. It was a lighter.

The Indian took out a bow and an arrow. He thrust the arrow at her. "Light." The lighter was unfamiliar to her, a metal-shelled specimen from her grandfather's days. But it lit at the first try, and she touched the flame gingerly to a wad of rags around the arrow's tip. She had scarcely done that before the bowstring twanged and a shuffler went up like a water balloon filled with gasoline.

The burning shuffler froze in place, howling as it burned and finally collapsing. The last, already nearer, broke into a loping stride, straight for Meg. The Indian stepped right in front of her, shouting in the first language he had used, this time only a single phrase. The shuffler backed up a pace, and the Indian took back his lighter and waved it in its face. The lolling head went stiffly back and forth. Then the Indian stepped aside and dragged Med with him, just before the better part of the kudlak's head disappeared at the roar of the 12-gauge.

"You did no have to do that," the Indian said to Carlos, who crouched at the end of the path. "Make a lot of noise. Could bring more. Could hit us."

"Oi fired up, an' it was taller than you," Carlos said. He pointed to the other kudlak, still burning merrily. "'Sides, 'e didn't 'sactly go quietly, did he? Speakin' of..." Just down the road, three more shufflers had stopped, and two were turning around. Four more were approaching from the other direction. Then, from out of the bushes a few feet away, another rose. It had a large wound in its temple, from Meg's magnum. Carlos blew its head off with his remaining shell, and then retreated.

"What's your name?" Meg said to the Indian as they followed.

"Joe."

"Indian Joe?" She shook her head, trying to keep Mark Twain from her mind. "What's your last name?"

"Johnson."

Two kudlaks had reached the path. Carlos unlimbered his 20-gauge and fired at the nearest kudlak, still more than 60 feet away. The range was a bit long for a shotgun, but the load was a slug that carried far enough to wing a cactus 200 feet away. Carlos fired another shot, and the other kudlak staggered and fell with a round in the chest. He pumped the gun for another shot, but the shuffler's path had put the damaged pump in the line of fire. "That's it," he said. "Time for the cavalry!" He pulled out a radio and said, "George, we're ready, but come in hot!"

From back at the turn-off, there was a whine of an engine, and a great cloud of dust. Carlos took a shot and felled the nearest shuffler between the pumps. Three more were headed down the path, while the one he had shot was getting to its feet. Another stood at the mouth of the path, looking back. Then the whine of the engine grew louder, and an amazing vehicular apparition rolled into view.

It was a boxy but streamlined van, painted in shades of yellow with a reddish-orange roof and trim. It looked like a VW Bus except for a grill that clearly indicated a front-engine vehicle, and bore the shape of a silver smiley face, and a clearly-modified roof gave it a humpbacked look vaguely like a buffalo Carlos winced as the van mowed down the hindmost shuffler. "You can't get parts by mail order no more," he said to nobody in particular.

Three young men instantly piled out of the camper van. The first, lanky, shirtless and armed with an aluminum bat, bounded out of the rear door, while the other two hustled out of the double doors in the side, one armed with a pick axe and another with a shovel. The pair teamed up to dispatch the kudlak getting to its feet, while their companion sprinted forward. One shuffler turned a hollow **clong**, just in time to catch the bat across knee cap. An upward swing caught it in the ear as it fell. The shirtless young man whooped and laughed, then swore in surprise more than concern when the last shuffler pivoted and came at him straight over its fellow. The shuffler on its feet tripped over the other as it started to rise from the ground. The young man simply stepped back and struck, again and again. Behind him, the team were struggling to dislodge the pick axe from the skull of the first zombie he had felled. Meanwhile the other shuffler at his feet was its way out from under the one he was vigorously beating and back to its hands and knees. Then the duo caught up, and one blow each finished the shuffler.

Two young woman emerged from the camper, one tall and athletic and the other short and leaning toward pudgy. The shuffler struck by the Thing was nearly at their feet, its back clearly broken: Its hands clawed the ground furiously and clutched for the a shapely leg, but the rest of its body hardly budged. The pudgy one struck it with a snow shovel, and then gripped the spur-shaped end of the handle to drive the edge straight downward into its neck. One final shuffler, having held back through the melee, turned around and started shuffling the other way. That was when a bearded, balding, grandfatherly man stepped out of the cab, and pulled a very long-handled shovel with a narrow, spade-like blade from a rack on the side of the roof extension The shuffler sped up as the older man followed, and it looked as if it would outpace its pursuer. Then the old man put on a little more speed, and suddenly thrust the shovel like a polearm. For a moment, the shuffler's feet scuffed in place. Then the man jerked back the shovel, and the shuffler dropped with its head nearly severed.


	5. Davey The Goliath

"Roighta," Carlos said as the new arrivals fanned out, "time to get you what you need. Laramie, get me a first aid kit!" The shirtless young man strode over, while Carlos sat Meg down on the hood of the police car. Laramie stood by, looking non-chalantly masculine as he lit up a cigarette. Meg noticed that the brand was "Laramie".

Phil looked over his shoulder. "Hey... Hey, she's bit! She's gonna turn into one of them!"

"Don't be stupid," Carlos said, firmly enough for the mechanic to fall silent. "I won't pretend it ain't bad, but we can take care of it, an' it's not too late..."

"You mean they found a cure?" Phil said anxiously. "What is it?"

"Penicillin! What'd'ya think?" He pulled out a bottle from the kit and poured it on, then a little more after further cleansing. Soon, he had Meg bandaged up. "George, this place is secure as it gets. Send the signal for the others to come forward. Give 'er a spare bottle." The bald man handed over one of two refillable water bottles at his waist before returning to the van.

"Drink up, and come with me, long as you can," Carlos told Meg. "You too, Phil. What'd you do here, anyway?"

"I was junior assistant, pretty much," Phil said as they walked back to the garage. "Pete was in charge, but he left most of it to Art, and he left most of the real work to Dwayne, so he took it out on Dwayne and Jonny took it out on me. Right before, they were all riding me about was busy about this crazy back order... Somebody wanted a part for this completely obscure European thing..."

"Cry me a river," said Carlos. "I had an order that was supposed to be in. Think you'd know if it's in?"

Phil shrugged. "Shipping and receiving's Art's job, mostly," he said. "That's what I kept telling Jonny, he's the one who should be looking for that part..."

"Screw it," Carlos growled. "Where's the records?"

Meg's memory was jogged. "There was a clipboard... Over there!" She pointed where it had fallen off the wall.

"So anyway, let me tell you about this order," Phil said to Meg. "It's a transmission part, basically, 'cept it was kinda part of the steering too, 'cause the vehicle had front wheel drive. I didn't completely understand it myself, and they told me don't worry about it, just find the part. Only, the vehicle's, like, 30 years old, an' it turns out, the whole _company _went under more than 20 years ago. Obviously, whatever this piece o' crap is, it should have been junked years ago, but Jonny tells me, it's not our job to tell the customers what to do. So anyway, what we finally find out is that the only place in a thousand miles that has this part is in..."

"Moab?" Carlos roared explosively. He advanced on Phil, thrusting the clipboard in his face. "The part's in Moab?!"

"Oh my god," Phil said. "That's- it's- you're the guy with the Goliath?"

"Borgward Goliath Express 1100," Carlos said. "And you're gonna get real familiar with it!"

The front parking lot was filling up. The strange van had pulled up behind the Beetle, and the police car was being driven off to one side to make room for more. A VW Thing pulled in, drawing a distinctly ghoulish trailer made from the front of a Beetle, followed by a Bus, a Rabbit pickup and a gray GMC van. Styling indicated that the GMC was at least five years younger than the Bus, but the latter was clearly in better shape by far. Pulling up the rear were a yellow Jeep Wagoneer with a geometric Indian-blanket pattern for trim and a vaguely whale-like white camper van.

Meg paused for a closer look at the van's smiley face, which bore the name "GOLIATH" in metal letters between the headlights and a semicircular plate with the legend "Express 1100" in a forlornly exciting lightning-bolt font. The lower body bulged outward, while the upper part tapered rather precipitously beneath the overhanging shell. The upper body was painted a peachy hue like desert sand, a middle section between the windshield and a line of trim over the headlights and grill was an earthy shade of yellow, and the lower part was a deep mustard gold.

"That's one weird roof extension," Phil said, examining the orange shell that protruded over the upper body. "It almost looks like an upside-down boat."

"Yeah, that is weird," Carlos said. "It's a boat. Ah, and it's backwards, too." Meg took a closer look, openly incredulous, but there could be no mistake. Even the oddities of its shape made sudden sense. It was a tub-like affair, with a scalloped bow and boxy stern that were not unlike a popsicle. The stepped sides that handily held tools and gear were gunwales and oarlocks, and a shelf-like projection that shaded the windshield was just right for a place to mount an engine.

"So what, somebody built a boat to fit on the roof?" Meg asked.

"Nay, the boat was probably built first, leastways the shell," Carlos said as he stepped inside. "And it's not on the roof. F'r all intents and purposes, it is the roof." It was easy to see what he meant. The inside had been reconfigured like a camper, with a counter and cabinets behind the cab and a three-seat dinette and couch set against the walls to the rear. The arrangement left an open passage where most of the original ceiling had been turned into an oversized sunroof. Benches on either side of the inverted boat were being used for overhead shelving and a bunk. Carlos opened a cabinet in the right rear corner and took out a well-worn and moderately stuffed binder. He sat down at a dinette seat whose back abutted the cabinet, and Phil sat across from him in a wider seat which faced sideways directly across from the left passenger door. Meg sat down at the far end of the couch, which was shaped to fill the space between the side doors and the left corner.

"I'm going to tell you a bit about myself, and the people with me," Carlos said. "Then I'm going to tell you a story. As you might guess, I'm a geologist, and I'm from Australia. I also served two tours in your last war, an' you know how that turned out. After that, I got my doctorate, came over here, and got a job as a professor. When all this started, Dr. Carradine- that's George- and I were taking twenty-some students out on a field trip. I heard about it sooner than most, an' I knew quite a bit already. So, we rounded up some extra people and a bit more gear, quiet-like, an' made it a long trip."

Meg curled up on the couch, idly listening as Carlos continued, "Our school's middlin', size-ways, but we make up for it a bit in reputation. We do mining and engineering, an' we do good work in applied research. Enough of the right people know it that sometimes, we get funding for a project that normally would be corporate or gov'ment. About ten years ago, we got one that was bigger than most. Not my department, literally, but the way I hear, it was major money, at least for a uni grant, and nobody really knew where it was coming from. The assignment was to test new automotive technologies in existing vehicles... technologies that could reduce the need for petroleum.

"However much money there was, wherever it came from, it sure didn't go into quality vehicles. Some were donated by students and faculty. The rest were all straight from the junkyards. There were four vehicles, that I know about, that succeeded and survived. There's Moby Ralph out there: It's an Ultra Van, a line of campers based on the Corvair. Good for 20 mpg, most fuel-efficient motorhome on the road till the bloody hippies killed it. The designers tried using the rear engine to heat the cabin, and the tech boys did one better and set it up for thermoelectric power generation. That pickup, we call it Thumper, came later, but it has the same modifications the team performed to make a 3-door diesel hatchback run off biofuel, which is kitchen grease. The original was Peter Rabbit; you'll see it, and others later.

"And, of course, we have this: Davey the Goliath. The mark was pretty big in Australia when it was a going concern; I buy one, and take it over here, right hand drive an' all. It's good for walkabouts, and I take it on field trips now an' then, till the engine gives out. Right about then the call goes out, and when I talk to the tech boys about my troubles, they get real interested. Something about troubles fitting their engine in vehicles of the right power an' weight class, whereas the Goliath's built for an engine that's wider than most. Problem solved. I give them my van, and they agree that if it takes, they'll give it back to me. 'Bout a year and a half goes by, suddenly there's a big uproar over the project, something to do with where the money came from, or the results, or both. Everything's shut down, sudden, an' more'n a few people get canned. I get a call from one of them, sayin' to come and pick up my van, an' bring a few friends.

"I come, with Dr. Carradine, my grad student named Becky, a pipsqueak freshman who goes by Laramie, an' a friend of mine named Ted, who brings his lady friend Dianna. She's got 'is ring, but they don't really talk about where they're at, and quite a few people are keeping an eye on her waistline. We come out to a spot in the boonies that turns out to be a wrecking yard. There's at least fifty cars there, done out all kinds of ways. A lot of them look wrecked for real, but at least a dozen look more'n fit to run. The guy's waiting beside the Goliath, done up like this, and gives me the keys. Then he tells everyone else that they can take any car they like, and he will sign the title.

"Long story short, Dianna and Ted take Moby for a honeymoon lodge, Becky takes Peter, George picks a giant home-built motor home we call Monstro, and Laramie makes off with an old bus some crazy 'ippie turned into an RV. The next day, the guy's gone for good, completely drops off the map, and within a week, every vehicle in that yard is so much scrap. Within a year, more'n half the faculty involved aren't just out of the university, but no longer doing any significant work in their fields. We know that a few ended up dead. But there's a few left who give us help later."

"Most of the stuff the guys did was conceptually advanced, but off-the-shelf as far as technology and materials. That's probably how they got away with handing so much of their stuff over to us; nothing the sponsors could claim as proprietary. It also allowed us to replicate a lot of their work with other vehicles, like Thumper. In fact, we built ourselves a little fleet of Rabbits, and customized a couple RVs. We couldn't always do it as well, though. Peter, for example, can burn propane. We junked a Rabbit trying to replicate it, but we did it with the diesel on a Dodge Travco we call Flipper. We put in an hybrid electric transmission, copy of something the tech boys put in Monstro. Only there were some problems we couldn't fix in the suspension, there when we got it from what we know now, but our hot rod job prob'ly made things worse. So, long story short, when it's rollin', the 'ole bloody thing goes up an' down like Flipper... But this, this is a whole other can o' worms." He led Phil outside to the cab. Meg stretched out on the couch. At a firm push, an arm rest swung down, giving her room to stretch her legs.

The driver and passenger seats were a single piece, though the seat cushion was divided in two unequal parts. Carlos yanked back the larger cushion that covered the passenger seat and a central hump that split the cab. Beneath it was a cover for the engine compartment, clearly newer than the rest, with a hinge for convenient raising. Carlos opened it. Where the various parts of the engine would have been, there was something like an oversized film can, completely sealed against tampering or inspection.

Phil nodded. "I think I heard about something like this... It was supposed to be strictly theoretical. A rotary engine without moving parts, able to run on a range of fuels..."

Carlos nodded and chuckled. "Try anything remotely resemblin' fuel. Most of that binder is a record of testing what crazy crap this thing couldn't burn. Which wasn't much. Mileage isn't great, horsepower's downright weak... but it will run on most anything. Petrol. Diesel. Propane. Ethanol. Bloody alcoholic beverages."

He slammed the hatch and jammed the cushion into place. "You call this thing a piecea crap, I won't argue. It means something to me, but I'd junk it in a second. But this engine is priceless. As long as it keeps running, I can make it anywhere. _As long as the bloody transmission don't tear itself apart before we replace the one gear that's wearing out. _And you're gonna do your bloody best to keep it from happenin'. Not because I'm gonna bust your arse if ya don't, but because there's things behind us that aren't gonna stay where we been. An' you don't wanna be there when it all catches up."

"Hey doc!" Laramie called. "We searched the station, and we're ready to check out back. It looks like some nice stuff. I saw a couple Travcos..."

"We want 'em," Carlos said. "At least one. We want it if we have to tow it away."

Laramie smiled. "Can't resist two of something..."

Carlos grinned back. "If it's up to me, I get two of _everything. _Go check out the back. Take this guy with you. Stay business-like. Anyone who isn't part of the search is on duty for pumping gas. Check out that Dodge, too. If it can roll, it goes with us. And if people start running out of things to do, it's time to get ready to move on."

Laramie turned aside, swung open the doors, and paused. The extended couch was blocking half the doorway. It was filled quite comfortably by Meg, who was sound asleep.


	6. They Shoot GMC's, Don't They?

**The title of this chapter is a gag I thought up a long, long time ago, directly inspired by experiences with an actual vehicle which, in fairness, gave many years of good service before things got to that point. I couldn't say what year or model it was, but it's pretty much featured as I remember it. **

Carlos strode into the garage. George walked alongside him, while Laramie and Phil followed at a few paces. The professor stooped to pick up the .45 handgun and a loose clip that had belonged to the flattened former police officer, stowing it in a loop in his belt, and inspected the vehicle on the lift. A quick appraisal confirmed that it was a Dodge one-ton 4WD Power Wagon, with the oversized wheels and beefed-up suspension of a custom off-road rig and a crew cab that was not standard for the model. The grill marked it as a '61, having an iconic early-sixties shape vaguely like the face of a longhorn bull and a mesh pattern throughout that was retired after a single year. The stakebed rear and a railroad tie bumper added a touch of redneck engineering. "It's one of a kind, far as we can tell," Phil said. "The engine under the hood is a diesel. The guy gave it to us to have an electric transmission installed, like yours. I heard he was a regular customer back in old Pete's days, maybe a friend. Except, I got the feeling old Pete didn't like him... maybe got scared of him, by the end."

"One of a kind," Carlos said. "...We'll take it anyway."

He strode out the back, into the rear lot. There were a dozen cars in view. The lot ended at a line of outbuildings and a wooden fence that clearly enclosed a much larger junk yard. At least a score of trailers and motor homes poked above the fence right at the front, in addition to the edge of a gabled roof that was presumably Pete's place. Ranks and files of many more tall trailers and vehicles receded into the distance, and who knew what entirely out of view.

Carlos looked over the cars first, twirling his hammer thoughtfully. His eyes lit on a VW Bus crewcab pickup, which had the V-shaped front and split windshield of the original line. "We want that," he said. His eyes turned next to a van of similar vintage which was fairly generic except for the grill that marked it as a Jeep. "Damn. The FC passenger van variant. We spent years lookin' for one of these."

"Ah... we got it running well enough, but the engine's a bit off," Phil said. "Rattles, squeals, you know..."

Carlos ignored him, sizing up a tiny Subaru that looked more like a golf cart. "We'll take that one, too."

"But, ah, that's the 360, ah, sir. It received one of the worst ratings ever for safety in a collision..." Carlos gave him a cool glance, and he fell silent. Carlos went down the line, and stopped at a GMC pickup, slapping the hammer against the palm of his hands. "Well, sit, now that is a fine vehicle. I notice you already have a GMC van, so I'm sure you already know, they're among the best..." Only then did he see the coldness ell, the engines can be a bit labor intensive. And they can get rusty, though it's not a problem in this climate. But rest assured, nothing on the road is more durable than a GMC, especially the..."

Carlos took several long paces back and drew the .45 from his belt. Four out of seven shots perforated the hood, with the others hitting the windshield, an unsuspecting trailer and the sky. He loaded the other clip and and an extra cartridge, pointed the gun sideways at a headlamp and fired eight shots in rabid succession before the gun clicked empty. The bullets fell in a wide but level grouping that took out the right blinker, the left headlamp, and the "M" in GMC. He put the pistol back, took a few more paces, and drew the 20-gauge. The first two blasts sprang the latch of the hood and made a geyser out of the radiator. He unfolded the stock and blew out the front tires, and then shot off the driver's side mirror for good measure. Then he stowed his weapon and closed in with the hammer.

The first swing put the blunt end of the head straight through the windshield. Carlos yanked it back out and struck again with the point, gouging sideways through the fractured safety glass. After three more blows, the windshield was as broken and crumpled as a peeled egg shell. He smashed the remaining windows, and turned his attention to the remaining headlamp. One phenomenal blow drove the point of the hammer all the way through the reflector. A wrenching, crunching twist and a hard tug wrenched the entire headlamp out like a gouged eyeball, complete with wires that held it dangling at the level of the bumper. Two more blows did not so much knock the headlamp loose as completely pulverize it. Finally, Carlos wrenched a hubcap off one of the front wheels and heaved it skyward. At the peak of its trajectory, he drew his 12-gauge and let fly with both barrels, missing completely.

"Looks like you're losing your touch," Laramie said.

"Start runnin', and we'll test the hypothesis," Carlos answered with a grin. He turned to Phil. "For the record... I love a good Jeep, and I'd stake my life on a four-by-four Dodge. VW's pretty good, and Ford isn't bad. I'll even give a Chevy a chance. But _I __**hate**__ GMC's._"

Sure enough, there were two Dodge Travco motor homes just inside the gate, both definitely late-'60s vintage. Though it was Winnebago that had put the RV on the map of commerce and popular consciousness in the late 1960s, mass-produced Travco motorhomes had hit the market about five years earlier, and the line had remained successful until higher powers at Chrysler shut the division down. Early in the history of the enterprise, Travco had introduced a major innovation that set their product apart from the motley and costly one-off truck conversions that had been available before that time, and still made them instantly recognizable: The resources of the automotive giant had been put to work to produce purpose-built, ovoid fiberglass bodies, in lengths ranging from 21 to a tremendous 32 feet, almost always white and usually with a broad, straight stripe from the headlamps to the tail lights. Many compared it to a "Silly Putty" container; Carlos would have compared it to a submarine. The red-striped 32-footer before him, however, called to mind a beached whale. "Ah, bloody 'ell," he said, his shoulders sagging, "even a GMC deserves better'n that..."

"And we thought Flipper was bad," Carradine added. Though the rear of the body extended well past the rear wheels, the front sagged so low that, if the bumper was not touching the ground, then the distance was indiscernible to the naked eye. The hull listed visibly to starboard as well. Clearly, the suspension was not simply overloaded, but in a state of collapse. The rest did not look much better. Despite the dry climate, rust was rampant on the exposed metal parts, and even the plasticized body had conspicuous yellow and orange stains. The tires were bald, the windshield broken, but Carlos took an especially hard look at the fine cracks in the rubber lining of the window. He also sniffed at a distinctly foul smell.

"This is what I've been telling you about," he said to Carradine. "Check the window gaskets first. If they're in bad shape, chances are the hoses inside will be worse. You know what happens if they go bad: Water damage at least, maybe sewage contamination, and worst case scenario, propane or even petrol spills. I don't like that smell, neither. Normally, I could put it down to an overfull black water tank, but these things are supposed to burn fecal matter. Best guess, either the Destroilet backed up, or else there've been animals nesting in there... This thing's not just a wreck, we're lookin' at fire an' flat-out biohazard. We don't even go in there if we don't have to."

The other specimen certainly looked more promising. It was only 21 feet, but in every other respect it would have presented itself as a superior specimen even if both had been like new. The wheels and suspension were not only in good condition but better than factory standard. The body was all but Teutonic in its straight and level pose, with just enough wear and weathering to confirm that the vehicle had spent the better part of its years in regular use rather than taking up space with other trophies of someone's midlife crisis. Carlos took an especially long look at the wheels. "I wouldn't swear to it," he said, "but this sure looks like a four-wheel-drive rig."

A quick examination of the cab, with assistance from Phil, confirmed it. Laramie came forward from the rear with a smile. "Doc, you wouldn't believe how sweet this is," he said. "They got a full-size fridge, heating and AC, and what we're pretty sure is a filtration system."

"Perfect," said Carlos. "The only thing left to check is the propane tank..." He hurried outside, leaving the others to continue admiring the interior. After a few minutes, Dr. Carradine came out to investigate the long silence.

Carlos had opened an access panel that covered a propane tank. He was still standing, staring as if in horror that battled sheer incredulity. Carradine looked over his shoulder with definite concern. Laramie and Phil followed to see what was the matter. They saw a propane tank, in good condition, hooked in to the RV's systems with a hose... a garden hose. Not to mention generous applications of duct tape, some of which had been applied to the middle of the hose. "Well," Laramie said, "at least they patched the hose."

"Twice," Phil added. "Ah... at least."

They turned aside, grimly. "All right, we have a great rig, with one flaw," Carradine said. "We can fix it. Put in a new hose, hell, a whole new tank. We've done it with worse."

"Sure we've done it," Carlos said. "Enough to know it's **never**_ `just one thing'_. By now, we might as well do a chart, like the kids did for the stupid things the stupid people do in those stupid old monster movies. We find a rig that looks great, except one thing that somebody let by with a subpar patch. So we fix it, and drive off. Only after a few weeks, or days, or hours on the road, something else turns up, the kind of thing even a good crew could miss it. So we fix that, only it's more work, we have to tear things up a bit, and while we're at it we find something else and fix that. And then, _if _it didn't happen already, the first fix we did goes wrong, and when we redo it we figure out it was worse than we thought, and like as not we actually made it worse. And we can repeat with variations until something finally gets bad enough that we have to tear down to the chassis just to get at it, which is right about the time we find the big problem that makes everything else look like termites on a sinking ship. O' course, then there was the time we actually _had_ termites..."

Even as he spoke, he was clearly trying to convince himself as much as the others. "C'mon, we've seen the same thing with rigs that looked better'n this! For cryin' out loud, the last owner thought it was a good idea to replace a propane line with a garden hose and duck tape!"

"All right, what's the alternative?" Carradine asked, not quite rhetorically. "Nothing's perfect. What else can we do, besides leaving it here to rust?"

"Easy," said Laramie. "We tear it apart. We put those shocks in Flipper, and the water filter wherever we can fit it, use anything else we can, and if there's any left over we're sure will work, we take it for later."

Carlos shook his head. "We've tried that, too. Swapped-out parts never work as well. And putting those shocks in Flipper is like headlining Richard Kiley in the Podunk Community Theater production o' _Oklahoma_. The real problem with Flipper is that we put it together without a clue what we were doing, and we got too invested in it to admit it was time to give up. Sure, the suspension was junk, but we all know, even shocks as good as those would go just as bad, an' sooner than later. No matter what we do, assumin' nothing else goes first, it's gonna end up..." He jerked a thumb at the 32-foot write-off.

"Yeah, but as long as we keep it going, we save on gas," Laramie said. "Or we would if we didn't keep Monstro around."

"If we could get that running," Carradine said, pointing to the four-wheel RV, "it wouldn't use any more gas than Monstro."

"A bonfire wouldn't use up gas much faster'n Monstro," Carlos snapped back. He pondered. "All right... We give this thing a shot, after we take out this whole atrocity and patch a new tank in proper. An' if this rig even starts to give us trouble, then we take it apart and use whatever we can for Flipper."

"Okay," Laramie said indifferently. Carlos couldn't hide a flinch at the sound as his student lit another cigarette.


	7. Dianna

**This is mostly foreshadowing a major story point I thought of while I had this project on hold, and introducing another character from Carlos's original adventures. I considered whether to bring in Ted, too, but I decided against it. Sorry, Ted.**

Meg drifted back into awareness at the feeling of motion. She stirred at a dry chuckle, and came fully aware at the giggle of a little girl. She raised her head and saw the Indian in the corner dinette seat, reading a paperback. Or, rather, looking, as she saw it was a collection of MAD magazine's wordless _Spy Vs. Spy_ comics. He chuckled again as he turned another page. She turned her head and saw a girl of perhaps five years old, perched in the the lap of a woman with vividly deep red hair, who in turn had turned herself sideways in the longer seat of the dinette.

"Hi, I'm Dianna, and this little thing is Janie," the redhead said. The girl giggled. "I hear your name is Meg."

"Yeah," Meg said. She started to sit up, but then sank back. "I think Dr.- Carlos mentioned you- you and Ted?" Dianna nodded, and Meg knew immediately that Ted was not in the picture. She changed the subject: "Where are we going?"

"For now, back to the main road," Dianna answered. "Dr. Wrzniewski sent some of us back to meet the rest of our group."

"Rest... how many of you are there?"

"I can't say, myself," Dianna said. "About a hundred. People come and go all the time... Oh, don't misunderstand. We've lost people, but mostly, they just go. Carlos and George take people with us if they really need help, like you, but they never make anyone stay. Some do, some don't, it's about half and half. Mostly, the ones that go head for someplace... or people... they wanted to get to all along."

"So where are you headed for?" Meg said.

The girl chimed in, "Where are we going, Mommy?"

"Nowhere in particular, I suppose," Dianna said with a slightly wistful smile. "As far as we know, there really aren't any places left to go. We just stay on the move; we stop to pick up food and gas as we go along, and go places if we have a lead on something big..."

"And get away from them," Meg added.

"Yeah," Dianna said sadly. "Them."

"You know... I heard something," Meg said. Dianna looked a little more serious, and Meg guessed, correctly, that she already knew the story. "I heard that the government was setting up safe places. First it was shelters in the cities, run by the police. Then the army came in and started moving people out to places in the country side, deserts and mountains, like... reservations." She glanced at the Indian, but saw no reaction. "That's what I heard. Well, my boyfriend told me he heard it."

Dianna drew an arm a little tighter around her daughter. "No, they tried that, but it never worked out," she said. "We don't waste time looking for anything like that." The Bus followed behind them, and as they made a turn Meg saw Moby Ralph behind it. By the time they reached the turn-off from the main road, they passed three more vehicles, a 27-foot Travco that could only be Flipper, a World War 2-vintage Jeep, and a towering silver-skinned vehicle that was not so much a motorhome as a self-propelled trailer. "Monstro, I presume?" Meg said.

"Yup," Dianna said. "One and only."

"What is it, anyway?" Meg said, craning her neck. "It looks like somebody just went, like, Frankenstein and put an old Airstream trailer on a big truck."

"It was a Spartan, actually," Dianna said. "The trailer, I mean. You can recognize them by that front window, like a wrap-around windshield that sticks forward, especially on the early models. That one's 1947; we checked the nameplate. There was a big boom in streamlined aluminum trailers right after the war, and Spartans were at the high end. A lot of them got used a little, and sold off or just abandoned. Then, somewhere along the line, someone thought of turning them into what we'd call motorhomes."

"Why di'n't they just take the trailer, Mommy?" Janie said.

"Well, Janie," Dianna said mischievously, "sometimes even big boys do really silly things... ."

Meg sat up as a pickup truck went by. Its boxy but streamlined cab, painted red and white with a siren on top, gave her a sense of deja vu. "That's Little Red, our A100 pickup, and here's Red and Big Red Jr, our A-series vans," Dianna said. Two vans, clearly variants of the same model as the pickup and also clearly former fire department vehicles, followed behind, and Meg recognized it as one her family had owned when she was in grade school. One was longer than the other, and lacked windows. "Red's an eight-door passenger van, and Big Red has an expanded hundred-and-eight inch wheel base; they called it the A108. They all have the 318 engine upgrade, the same they used in the B-series and even some of the L-series trucks. Speaking of, here's our big boys..."

Two more fire department vehicles, a flatbed carrying a GMC Vandura and an even bigger tank truck. They bore about as much mutual resemblance to the pickup and van as the "Before" and "After" guys in a marginally convincing mail- order miracle fitness ad. "Those are Red Wagon and Gunga Dodge, two of our L-series trucks. Gunga Dodge is an L700 two-thousand gallon water carrier. It's the biggest vehicle we have, about 25 tonsfull.. if we can keep it full. The Wagon is an L600, and we think started as a ladder truck. It was stripped down to the cab when we got it, and a mechanic bought it and turned it into a flatbed car carrier. That's a funny story...

"Back when Carlos was starting at his school, he talked his department into buying a 108 new for his department's field trips, but about ten years later, they sold it to help pay for two new fifteen-passenger GMC Vanduras. Several vehicles got sold, and the faculty bought up most of them, like that Type 2 Bus at the station. Professor Harrington turned that one into a camper, and George bought a Dodge twelve-passenger that ended up back in the field trip roster. But the 108 was snapped up before anyone even knew about the sale. Carlos was furious, and he was seriously obsessed with getting another 108. Then a few years later, he got a lead on one that was being sold off at a municipal fire department auction. He went with Ted... this was a few years ago... and found the van in a lot with the other vehicles. Ted told me, after, that it was no reserve, but Carlos put down everything they had in the first bid. And then it turned out it was the only bid!" She smiled, but pressed a hand to her eye.

Meg asked, not quite sputtering, "Did- he...?"

"No," Dianna said. "He- It was before any of this. A few months after the auction, actually." She gently nuzzled Janie, and Meg said no more.

"Ah, and there's the Yellow Submarine." Another L700 passed, a semi with the yellow and black colors and orange lights of municipal maintenance vehicle and a similarly-painted tank trailer in tow. "Carlos got the truck and trailer at a municipal auction, same as the fire department vehicles. It was probably used to deliver fuel to road construction crews and remote construction sites. The big trailer's 5000 gallons with two compartments, split about 60-40. We fill the big one with diesel, and the other with regular gas... or, again, we would if we could keep it full. And this is Yellow Cab, from the same lot."

They pulled to a halt alongside a Jeep FC crew cab tow truck, painted with a jaunty checkered pattern. She knew enough about trucks to know that the A-frame tow rig was improvised and fairly light, but it had obviously been strong enough to go the distance with Greg's Audi hitched behind it "Hey, that's mine," she said. She pulled out the keys.

"I'm sure Professor Wrzniewski will give it back," Dianna said.

Meg stood up and looked out the door. In addition to the tow truck, there was another yellow FC fitted out as a light tank truck and towing a second tank on a trailer, a Jeep Gladiator with an unusually large slide-in truck camper and a 3-door Rabbit hitched to a fiberglass trailer. Meg took a closer look at the trailer, whose rounded shape and orange color called Cinderella's pumpkin carriage to mind. It was small, with a body only about ten feet long, and presumably light-weight, but still looked a bit big for such a small car to be towing.

She took an even more careful look at the camper on the truck. Part of the roof was moving. As she watched, the cab-over front of the roof, already much taller than the usual upper bunk, expanded into an upper room that opened onto the rest of the roof like a balcony. A man emerged, waved in the direction of the Goliath, and then unfolded a chair.

Meg was surprised when someone called back from the cab, "That's Daniel. He's my husband. I'm Becky." She looked belatedly at the driver. It took a moment to convince herself that the woman at the wheel was old enough to be driving the car.

"Wait," Meg said aloud, running through Carlos's story. "Becky... the grad student?"

"That would be me," the woman said. "I'm into my doctoral work now, or I was."

"That would make you..." Meg frowned. "Older than I am."

"I don't know," Becky said. "How old are you?" Janie giggled.

"Well, might as well go meet people and see what shape my car's in," Meg said. She stepped down, and Janie scampered after her. She looked over her shoulder, expecting the young mother to be following right behind her child. Instead, Dianna was slowly stretching one leg and then the other, before stretching out her arms and raising herself in a slow and steady motion. When she was on her feet, she reached over her shoulder and snatched up a cane. Meg tried not to stare as the woman who had already impressed her as a dynamic and vibrant beauty came hobbling out. She stopped trying when she saw the pervasive scars beneath the other woman's tank top.

"It was a single car accident" Dianna said, gripping Meg's shoulder for support as she made the descent to the ground. "I was driving, with Ted, and Janie... and her big brother and baby sister. I don't know what happened. Nobody does. They know Ted got Janie out. They think he had a chance to get Jack, too. Instead... They said they found him with his arms around me. They said that's why the the burns are on my back. Mostly." Then she hobbled a little faster after her daughter.


	8. Dr W and the Fridge of Doom

**Here's another installment for what it's worth. Per the title, this is heavy on the mobile homes, with a few good gags and a little social commentary. Incidentally, especially on the off-chance that somebody who knows mobile home history reads this, I intentionally deviated at several points from the actual specs of the mobile homes described, which I felt was an acceptable liberty given the premises of alternate history. I will leave anyone who would like to know where the fun of finding out.**

Phillip stared as Flipper undulated into the station, and gaped at the apparition that was Monstro. "That's the most dangerous rig I've ever seen on the road," he said, pointing at the sky-blue Travco. "If you've been driving that thing, you've got no right to complain about that garden hose. And that- I know a Spartan when I see one, but still- what the hell is that?"

Seen close-up, the first impression of Monstro was not so much size as sheer, primordial power. By the standards of modern RVs, its 27-foot length was not unduly impressive, though its height was considerable thanks to its large wheels and an added nautical-looking superstructure amidships. But what it lacked in size, it clearly made up for in dinosaurian durability. The originally silver skin had been allowed to weather to a pearl gray, and bore an impressive collection of dents, yet there was no evidence that its integrity had been compromised. As for the underlying chassis, the wheels and a winch at the front marked it as not only a serious cross-country truck but a likely military vehicle. It looked like it was built to conquer the world, and probably had.

"Those as would know think that Monstro could be the oldest motorhome on the road," Carlos said. "It was definitely built before 1960, probably no later'n 1956, and maybe even before 1950. There's no way to be sure. It was a one-off home-built, of course; back then, they all were, which is what makes the dates so slippery. It would have taken quite a bit of time to get it running, too, and there were continuous modifications after. But we know it started with three things: that big-arse streamline trailer, a haul-arse hot rod engine, and a bad-arse war surplus Dodge cargo truck. The way those old monsters were built, it's hard to even compare them to anything built later: Low horse power, massive torque, gas mileage that wasn't so much miles per gallon as vice versa, an' built so tough they could've bludgeoned Nazis with the parts. An' the crazy bastard who put it all together definitely knew 'ow to get the most out of what 'e 'ad.

"Long story short, Monstro's gross weight is just over six Imperial tons, give or take a few 'undred kilos depending on what's in the tanks. There's quite a few. That funny bridge thing musta been put in to make up for lost headroom putting 'em in. The engine's petrol, but in a class with a decent diesel. The tech boys rated it as 175 horsepower and 500 Newton-meters of torque. Even before they got to it, the engine was set up to burn on a range of fuels, mainly mixed in with the regular petrol. It wouldn't have taken much work; if fuel had negative octane, those old trucks could run on it. There's two generators, one propane and one petrol, an onboard garbage incinerator, and even a gray-black water tank

"Unfortunately, even the tech boys couldn't do much for fuel economy, 'bout eight miles per gallon, six if you have. But then there's the pulling power... Like I said, it's hard to properly read trucks this old, and for this rig, even getting base measurements was really tricky. The tech boys came up with ratings, but one way or another, they got way under actual performance. I couldn't give you numbers, but I can tell you this much: Once, we used it to move a bus. It was a winch-assisted pull, just far enough to get the bloody thing out of the mud. But that bus was twice as big as Monstro, with twenty people aboard that we couldn't get out, and it was stopped cold and dug in deep. It came right out and kept going till Monstro braked. If it'd been in gear, it prob-ly would've rear-ended Monstro- and I'd call it even money which'd be busted up worse."

Using Monstro's winch, they pulled the decrepit Travco to one side, making room for Laramie to pull out in the four-wheel-drive specimen. Just as it rolled into the back lot, smoke suddenly erupted from the engine. Laramie killed the engine and hastily evacuated as smoke erupted inside and was followed by fire outside. The more athletic female student sprinted up to douse the desultory blaze with an extinguisher. Carlos turned to Dr. Carradine, grinning like a shark. "I told you so," he said. He waved his arms as if appealing to the scattered bystanders. "_Didn't I say so? _It's**never**_**just one thing**__!_"

The female student, whose name was Annabelle, drew back as the smoke intensified, "I dunno," she said, coughing. She turned to Laramie."What did he say?"

Annabelle's pudgy companion, who answered to Jamie, trudged in and started beating back the smoke with a blanket. Laramie watched her for a moment, with a smile as subtle as the Mona Lisa, before he looked at Annabelle and said, "He_ said_ he was ready to take it with us." Then, while Jamie stuffed the blanket into the grill to stifle the last of the blaze, he lit yet another cigarette.

While Carradine supervised the dismantling the siren Travco, Carlos, Phil and Laramie went back into the junkyard. "We really don't have that many RVs, anymore," Phil said. "For a while, we had more than we could deal with. Old Pete had made handling trailers and RVs a sideline, buying them cheap, or keeping broken-down ones if the owner didn't want to pay to fix it. And Pete Junior says even back then, once in a while they would find a perfectly good one that someone just parked and left. But right about when I started, it got weird. We were finding at least one every week or so, a lot of them like new. We tried to sell them, but people just weren't buying them, so we scrapped a lot of them We would have probably ended up just leaving them, but by then we weren't finding them anymore. Pete said it was because the market had gotten so bad that manufacturers were shutting down production. He thought it was because gas prices were too high."

"He wasn't all wrong, but he didn't get it right," Carlos said. "The suits killed Travco a few years back, and there were others. Generally Mediocre shut down their mobile home division the same year. The people in the industry were all blaming it on gas prices, like what happened in the big gas shortage. Completely missing the big picture. The shortage made a mark on the business, same as for everybody, but in a year or two, the market recovered, even got better. The big bust was different. Everybody should've been able to see that gas prices had nothin' to do with it. The whole time, people were spending more on luxury cars than they ever did on mobile homes. Not to mention personal computers, VCR's, cable TV, bloody boob jobs... _That_ was the problem. The people who had money to burn, or thought they did, decided there were more_ fashionable_ things to waste it on.

"And what it really came down to was people's dreams. When mobile homes were big, it was because a lot of people in the cities were still sentimental about the old ways, living in the country and exploring the wilderness- not to mention, realistic enough to want a fallback if the new ways went south. Even the bloody hippies could appreciate that. But somewhere along the line, things changed. People got too caught up in the big city to think about going back into the land. And I think a lot of them, in some corner of their minds, that if things really fell apart, they would rather die in their condos surrounded by their designer clothes and home electronics than try to live another way. And when it happened, they did."

Phil halted at a pair of RVs next to Old Pete's place, which turned out to be an especially large trailer built and decorated to look like a fifties-trendy house. "These were Old Pete's pet projects," he said. "One's a Travco, and we don't have a clue what that other one is." The Travco was a 29-footer painted entirely yellow. The other was at least as long, and covered up by several tarps. Enough could be seen to know that it was painted deep purple, had a tapered tail and strange humpbacked cab, six wheels, and an elliptical grill with some kind of ornament covering it.

Carlos searched the Travco first, while his companions uncovered the other RV. He came out shaking his head. "I'll take it, but only because we've got nothin' better," he said. "Call it Mrs. Goldbrick. Now what do we have here?"

"Try Fee Fi Fo Fugly," said Laramie. The uncovered motorhome looked like a cross between an eggplant and a whale shark. The grill looked eerily like a sucking maw, and a large gold star directly over it did not improve on appearances.

"I'm callin' it Prince Chuck," said Carlos. "I know what it is, too; saw a want ad once, and learned a little more. It's called Daystar, from about ten years back. Apparently, the people who built it were church folk, an' they got the names from legends about the star of Bethlehem, which say it was so bright the wise men could see it in the day. I don't go that way myself, but I think there could be somethin' to it, if it was the kind of light as some see an' others don't: What they'd call a vision, and we'd call either a hallucination or a UFO. At any rate, it was hugely expensive, upward of fifty G's, an' they say fewer'n a score got built. But who knows..."

They ventured inside through a door in the rear of the bulbous cab. Carlos and Phil inspected the dashboard, while Laramie hung back. After only took a few moments of casual examination, he took off his sunglasses and stared "Holy crap," he said, rapping the frame of a doorway, "This is real wood! And not that plywood or that particle junk, either, this is solid."

Carlos looked over his shoulder, and then stood up to take a look himself. It was a surprising find. Wood had been common in trailers well into the 1950s, though even then inferior plywood was typical, especially for interior finishing. By the 1960s, wood products being phased out, and within another decade the closest thing one was likely to see to wood paneling in the average trailer was a tacky overlay pattern on the plastic. "Solid, hell," Carlos said. "This is _teak!_"

The tour was hasty but thorough, from the cab back to a sloping rear hatch. Carlos rattled off details as they went along: "Everything in here is like new, and crazy good to begin with... no wonder it was so expensive." He took one sniff and walked faster through the kitchen. "Bad smell, but that'd be food in the fridge... Looks like we got 30, 32 feet all told. The one I saw was shorter, and the rear was way different. Only four wheels, and it looked almost sawed-off, which put me off. I don't think it had a back door, either. This was definitely a deluxe edition... I wouldn't be surprised if it was a prototype of the line. Short as that was, _who knows..._" He stepped outside, and returned looking fairly satisfied. "The propane's in decent shape... Everything here looks good enough to roll. We just gotta do somethin' about that fridge..."

Carlos led the way back to the kitchen, looking more apprehensive than he had going into battle. The fridge was about four feet high, just big enough to be trouble to move. Carlos reached cautiously for the handle, and the others showed their confidence by taking several paces back. The smell was even fouler than it had seemed the first time. Carlos stepped to the other side of the fridge, where the opened door would be between him and anything that might fall out. He stretched out his arm, just reaching the handle. He took another sniff, then took another step back and took out his hammer. He reached out again, probing with the point of the hammer. On the third try, he hooked the handle perfectly. He looked up and down the handle, judging the odds of accidentally ripping it off. That was when he noticed that the others were looking down, and he followed their gaze down to the spot where a very small pool of greenish-black fluid had formed under one corner of the door.

The sounds of thumping, crashing, splintering wood, grunting, cursing and repeated applications of duct tape all resounded from behind the open rear hatch. Then Carlos came into view, holding up end of the fridge. The door was shut and sealed with enough duct tape to wrap a mummy, but he called a halt until Phil applied more. Then he bent his shoulders and hoisted it up, and with their combined efforts they managed to heave the appliance several feet. Without a glance to see where it landed and whether the duct tape held, they hurried forward to the cab, where Carlos and Phil started the vehicle and Laramie exited to start up Mrs. Goldbrick. Finally, they all raced as fast as they could away from the abominated fridge


	9. Exemple Por Les Autos

**Here's another installment, with a little undead action. I will also be posting a revision of the chapter before last. The title is from a French phrase "exemple pour les autres".**

As sunset approached, the encampment at the turnoff was rapidly expanding as vehicles arriving from the road joined those returning from Pete's. Dianna, Janie and Meg joined Daniel atop the camper, which with the truck was designated Skybox. Meg quickly estimated the fleet to be forty vehicles strong. Cars were outnumbered by vans and pickups, and there were a high proportion heavier vehicles, ranging from a Winnebago motorhome to a Gillig 30-passenger school bus. Dianna pointed out vehicles of interest. Janie pointed and laughed at an approaching old short bus painted to look distinctly like a watermelon. "Is that Laramie's bus?" Meg asked.

"So, Dr. W told you that story? Actually, no it isn't," Dianna said. She pointed to the Gillig. "That one is. We call it Gilligan." Meg goggled and then guffawed. "It started as a rear engine diesel bus in the fifties, probably one of the first, then someone turned it into a big motor home, and then the college rigged it up to run on a diesel-electric generator. There's solar panels on the roof, too. Lar sold it to George and Carlos eventually, but for months, he was trying to drive that thing around town. I heard he spent a grand on parking tickets alone."

"Then what about that one?" Meg asked as the short bus drew nearer, and momentarily answered herself, "It's a band tour bus... a weird, cheap, messed-up little tour bus." It was a Dodge truck conversion of late-forties vintage, either an early Power Wagon or one of the wartime trucks they were directly copied from. In addition to bands of light and dark green, there was purple-pink trimming that was wavy and smudged, including a solid field at the bottom that was the backdrop for the legend "HEDLEY KOW", presumably the band's name. Various irreverent captions in very official letters were positioned in official-looking places around the bus, such as "Gov. Wallace Academy For The Ungifted", "School of Hard Knocks", and the evident name of the vehicle "**F****Ä****RTHER**" on a placard over the windshield.

"Hedley and his band have been with us since our second week on the road. They're nice enough, their music, not so much," Dianna said. She raised her eyebrows mischievously. "You know what's really funny? The `H' is supposed to be silent." Janie burst into giggles. "Oh, and look over there. Recognize it?"

Meg followed a pointing finger to a large fire department station wagon, heavily chromed and polished and patriotically painted red, white and blue. "I can tell it's an ambulance," she said, "and it looks to be late-fifties, I think a Ford. But I've never seen a grill like that. You know, it really looks like a toilet seat, or one of those ladies' urinals."

"Yeah, it's one of those things everybody's heard of, but hardly anybody would recognize if they saw it," Dianna said. "What you're looking at is a 1959 Edsel. It was the last vehicle in the fire department lot. The way I heard, they hid it behind the tanker."

"And they thought injured people were better off in an Edsel?"

"The Edsel wasn't really that bad," Dianna said. "It just didn't live up to its own hype. And anyway, that paint job says parade duty. I think maybe they used it for a hearse." Meg laughed.

She looked at two more L600s, one a panel truck and the other a semi pulling a boxy refrigerated trailer. "Say," she said, "with all those tankers, don't you have one for regular gas?"

"When we started, we picked up a diesel big rig and a ten-thousand gallon tanker," Dianna said. "It wasn't worth the trouble. We actually managed to keep the tank full, or no more empty than when we found it, but it didn't make up for the gas the rig was using up from our diesel stores. I finally convinced Carlos we were better off taking our chances with what we can find on the road. Actually, I've been telling him the same thing about that refrigerated trailer. It uses up a lot of power, and a lot of maintenance, and meanwhile, it's only a quarter full, and any perishables we can find to put in it are already iffy at best."

Suddenly, Daniel snapped off two shots. Meg looked in time to see a shuffler go down a hundred yards down the road. Daniel kept his weapon up. It seemed to Meg that he actually relaxed when he saw five more following behind. He cut them down one after the other with well-aimed double-taps to the head, and when four of them rose again, he fired even more precise shots to the neck. He glanced at Meg, and answered the unasked question: "Corporal, Army special reconnaissance. I wasn't over there, that got done while I was finishing first in my class at the academy, but I wouldn't deny being in the neighborhood."

He shot a shuffler again, and continued, "We came up from the south and east. About a month back, our scouts ran across a big group out in the desert. We slowed down to stay behind them. We wouldn't be as close as we are now, but we really needed what we're looking for here. Those, and the ones you ran into, are just the ones that wandered off from their stragglers."

"Wait a minute," Meg said, "I came here from the other way, and I didn't see anything like what you're talking about."

"You wouldn't have," Daniel said. "At the start, there were films of bunches of Jonny Revs stumbling around, bumping together and tripping over each other like it was a vaudeville act. They showed it to us as training footage, and I heard they released it to the public. All BS from the brass. They staged it with captured specimens that were already in bad shape. I'm sure at least some were deliberately mutilated to make them slow and off-balance, the way they cripple a bull before they let it in the ring with the matador. I don't know what all they did, but I can tell you, no revenant in the field ever runs into another rev. It's an instinct, it has to be, and however it works, it gets stronger when they're together in greater numbers. The more there are, the more they spread out. With the biggest groups, you could walk right through and only see a few- until and unless they come after you."

"How often do they do that?" Meg asked.

Daniel shrugged. "All we know is, if they come after you once, they'll do it again. Always."

Meg looked about for some other topic of conversation, and her eyes lit on a returning GMC van, which she recognized as both the same van that had driven into the station behind the Goliath and the same model she had seen on the flatbed. "Hey," she said, "are those the same Vanduras that Carlos's Dodge got sold for?"

"The very same," Dianna said. "I swear he took them with us just to keep trashing GMC. That one on the flat bed hasn't run in months, and we stripped anything worth saving weeks ago. It's almost like he's saving it for some kind of revenge."

Back at Pete's, the last of the vehicles were pulling out. Carlos smiled were he stood tall in the front seat of his Thing as Flipper drove away with Teutonic poise on a set of new shocks. Then he looked to the new acquisitions as they lined up before him. There were the two RVs, the Subaru 360, the crewcab Bus, the Jeep van and the Power Wagon. He stepped forward and started tapping each vehicle with the side of his hammer.

"I confirm that your titles as Lady Maude, Duchess of Goldbrick and Chuck, Prince of Daystar," he said for the RVs, and continued down the line. "I dub you Princess Ladybug, you Baron Van Flatbed, Sir Squaremu, and you shall henceforth be known as Dodgzilla. You have been found worthy of the fleet. Perform your duties well, and we will take good care of you. If you do not..." He slapped the hammer in the palm of his hand and then glanced expectantly in the direction of the Vandura.

"Is he nuts?" Phil said over the hiss of an acetylene torch.

"It's his aboriginal heritage," George said, then hedged, "I think. I understand he spent most of his childhood with his parents and their tribe, before he was adopted by a white family. He doesn't talk about it much. Native Australian culture is based on animistic religion: Animals, plants and even the inanimate can be seen as having spirits with broadly anthropomorphic qualities. There are also many aspects that are a matter of symbolism and tradition, as much as literal belief..."

"I believe what the Prof's getting to," Laramie said, "is yeah, _of course _he's nuts." He lowered a mask and started a heavy buzz saw.


	10. Hedley Kow and the Krappers

**Here's an homage to the original "Dawn of the Dead", and a filk-style song inspired by an actual song I found titled "The Night They All Came Out", performed by one Zoogz Rift. I knew of the performer (now deceased) because a long time ago, I made a minor hobby out of collecting weird names of rock bands. The name stuck in my mind more strongly than others, and I very seriously considered using it an otherwise fictional character in this story, but pretty well gave it up after I determined that the real-life Zoogz had a significant career. I wouldn't go so far as to recommend him, but what I was able to find was intriguing enough for me to work into a story.**

As sundown approached, the encampment spread out on both sides of the road. Meg stayed close to Goliath, and so ended up with a front-row seat as the occupants of Farther set up stage. Five stage hands set up palettes as a stage and a modest but up-to-date sound system. Meg almost spit when their full banner was unfurled: HEDLEY KOW AND THE KRAPPERS.

"What's up with the band name?" Meg hissed to Carlos

"It's from an English legend," he said. "Hedley Kow was a fairy, or somethin' like that. He, or it, could change to any shape. It's prob'ly connected with legends behind the Loch Ness monster, which talk about a water critter called a kelpie that turns into a horse. George is into that sort of thing..."

"Okay," Meg said, "and what about... the rest of the name?"

"Well... they spelled it wrong."

Meg gave a perplexed frown. "What?"

Carlos pointed to two non-descript men setting up a synthesizer on stage. "Those are John and Harold. They're brothers, from England," he said. He pointed to a blond woman who moved in position to test the keyboard. "That's Jane, John's wife. And John's great-to-the- greath grandfather was an inventor named John... Crapper."

Jane stood at the keyboard, while the brothers set up a modest drum set plus a selection of less conventional percussion, including a child's xylophone, a washboard and a bicycle horn. Dick seated himself at the drumset, John picked up an electric guitar, and the trio went into some atonal warm-up free-styling. Jane closed her eyes and swayed sensually as she played, Dick banged away proficiently on the drums with inspired flourishes on the extra instruments, and John shuffled back and forth, keeping his eyes unapologetically on Jane. They were joined abruptly by a willowy redhead who alternated between short bursts from an instrument that looked like a fiddle with a crank and keyboard and snatches of unintelligible song that sounded almost like yodelling.

"That's Lady Elayne," Carlos muttered. "That thing she's got is a hurdygurdy. She's not really a part of the band. She and Hedley had an act together before he joined up with the brothers. I think they had a thing, too." The tone of his voice made Meg suspect that _he_ had a "thing" for Elayne.

Then the man who could only be Hedley took the stage, playing a simple squeeze box with no particular proficiency. He looked to be in his early forties, with long dark hair that was starting to recede. He wore a plaid shirt and knee-length khaki shorts with an impressive selection of noise makers in various pockets. He pumped harder and played faster as he took the stage, and the band went wild, as if absolutely determined to drown him out. Elayne played and ululated simultaneously, Jane bobbed and weaved in place as she pummeled the keys, Dick used a foot pedal to pound the bass drum while he frenetically worked over the rest of his instruments, and John started to jump up and down like a child in a tantrum. Hedley more than matched them, flailing his arms at the bellows like Icarus trying to fly. Finally, an English terrier waddled out and started to bark, and all fell suddenly silent.

Meg glanced sidelong at Carlos. "Well, look at it this way," he said, "if any of them are around, you can bet you're going to know it." Sure enough, Daniel fired several bursts, and then all was quiet. The band continued to go through their motions in the silence, as if the music were still going in their minds. Then Hedley swapped the squeezebox for a banjo slung over his shoulder, and strummed along with lyrics he delivered with the sing-song quality of a nursery rhyme.

"_Well one day old Lucifer called Heaven, said, `_There ain't no more room in hell_,' An' St. Pete says, `_We need a curve to get more bodies in here.'_ So the dead returned to Earth, and it sure was a sight, _the night they all woke up_." _He blew a slide whistle.

"_So the unknown soldiers came out of the tomb sayin' `_Peace out, man!_' Lincoln got up and said _`Segregation forever!' _ While Jefferson sat down and said `_Brown sugar's better!' The night they all woke up.

"_Lenin climbed out of the box and said, _`Capitalism rocks!' _Gandhi said `_No more Mister Passive Resistance!'_ And John called Ringo an' said `_Tell Paul_Wings sucks!' _**The night they all woke up!**_"_

"_Then all the stiffs in the churchyard came in and said to the priest, `__You told us when we die we'd live up in the sky in the sweet by and by. Instead we wake up in the same old muck, so _**Padre whatthe-!**_" _A riff from the band and a blast of the squeeze box covered the obviously intended profanity. _"__**The night they all woke up."**_ The band went through one last extended riff that cut off abruptly at the dog's bark.

The song was obviously their signature number. Meg clapped, and was moderately disturbed to see Janie doing the same. After that, they went into mostly covers, mostly mild sixties numbers that by their very benignity took on a disturbing quality. The weirdest was a muzak-like instrumental from the band that Carlos identified as "the Gonk". "Theme from a British kids' movie," he said. "Bloody crazy Brits..." A close second was John joining Jane at the keyboard for "Heart and Soul". He proved to have a eerily soft pitch, while his wife sang with a jarringly deep contralto. That was followed by a spaced-out version of "Georgie Girl" with the redhead singing the vocals. The performance wrapped up with everyone singing along with "Good Morning, Starshine," at which point Dianna carried Janie off to Moby Ralph.

As the stage came down, Carlos called to John: "Hey, I gotta talk to Hedley."

While Carlos waited, Meg talked briefly to Jane: "So, Carlos told me about the name..."

"What about it?" she said. "A name's a name."

"Yeah, but... Well, did you take his name?"

"Why wouldn't I?" Meg tried not to look perplexed. "What, are the hip girls against a woman taking her husband's name now?"

"No, of course not, but... you shouldn't have to."

"I didn't." Meg stopped trying to hide her bafflement. "Look, I thought about it, and I figured, most important inventions in human history: fire, the wheel, the flush toilet. Nobody knows who made the first two, and I didn't want to be the reason people forget who made the other one. So I took his name, and when we have a son, the world will have another John Crapper." By then, Jane was smiling herself, and Meg finally allowed herself to laugh.

Hedley arrived with a set of bongos under one arm and a didgeridoo over the other shoulder. John took his wife's hand, and they hustled for the bus. "Put those down," Carlos said sternly. Hedley complied. "We've got some new vehicles, and we need to do some recon. First light tomorrow, if not before, I'm leading a scouting party west, and I'm taking some of our new acquisitions with us to make it a shakedown. I want your bus with them as backup." Hedley shrugged in resignation. Carlos looked to Meg. "I want you to go with them, show us where you been."

"I can do that," she said hesitantly, "but I don't know if I can be much help. There really isn't much to see. Just... a lot of them." She saw that her hands were trembling.

"Then show us where you saw them," Carlos said. "Tell us how many. You might see things that jog or memory, even notice things you didn't the first time. You can help us, and it's going to help you too."

Meg squeezed her hand into a fist, and the trembling stopped. "I'll do it," she said. "We can take my Audi."

"We have enough vehicles already, and I want you in the old Jeep with Joe," Carlos said. "But it's appreciated. Now, I need you to prepare... by getting in that van now and getting a good night's sleep." Meg found she was more than happy to comply, and found she was especially comfortable in the upper bunk.

Not long after, Carlos looked in, with Laramie looking over his shoulder. "You haven't told her," his student said casually.

"What good would it do if we did?" Carlos responded rhetorically. "If there's anything we know, it's that whatever happens is mostly in the head. Telling them it _could_ happen is the surest way to _make_ it happen."

The fiberglass boat had a plexiglass window on the bottom, with one edge just over the bunk. Meg slept, not so much peacefully as simply without conscious thought. Thus, when she awoke, she had no notion of the passage of time, except that it was darker than when she went to bed.

She was on her side, and tried to shift, which was when she discovered she could not move. She could not even raise her head. She found she could move her eyes, though. She looked down, and saw Laramie stretched out on the couch. Then she looked up, at the skylight, and saw a face peering down. She saw only a face, as clearly as if it was illuminated by full moonlight.

It was Greg.


	11. Once Bitten

**I was planning on going straight into more adventuring, but I felt this was a good point to develop my "take" on the received zombie lore, which I have decided to mix in with some authentic folklore. I also decided to go ahead and work in a "love interest" angle. It's something I have previously considered anathema for the character in question, but seems natural enough here.**

Davey the Goliath was parked next to the Thing, and the strange trailer widely known as Eric the Half a Bug. The Thing was Carlos's personal vehicle, and Eric was his own creation, a travel trailer in the style of a teardrop where he usually slept. The scream in the morning air had scarcely died down before the iconic Beetle hood shot open. Carlos sat up with his 20-gauge at ready, then scrambled out, clad in gym shorts and a white undershirt. He reached up to close the hatch while he surveyed the camp, and then looked back inside as if he had forgotten something.

"You, Out," he said succinctly.

The lilting voice of Lady Elayne answered, "_I _didn't ask to stay..." Carlos slammed the hood and stalked away, while the willowy woman made a gracefully discrete exit through a cut-down and reversed cab door on the far side of the bow.

Carlos came inside the van and rebandaged Meg's wound while Laramie recounted what Meg had told him of what happened. The one thing he mentioned observing himself was that he woke at the sound of her heavy breathing, and in the process saw her eyes open before she screamed. As they withdrew back out the door, they both mentioned "hagging" and "old hag" in their mutterings, which seemed to be jargon that needed no further explanation between them. Carlos nodded, and gave his student a stern, sad gaze. Meg's hands were trembling, but she felt more embarrassed than fearfully. The fact that so few people had gathered was, in many ways, making it all the more embarrassing. "Please, I had a bad dream, and I woke up thinking it was real," Meg said, not believing it. "Okay? I know that, and I'm sorry I woke you."

Lady Elayne strode nonchalantly through the midst of the bystanders. "We get a few screamers most every morning," she said. She shrugged, and discretely pointed a finger at Carlos in the process. "Let's get you over to my place..." She led Meg, and Carlos and Laramie followed, and Indian Joe shuffled after them. They headed toward the strangest of the automotive apparitions in the fleet, a Beetle that had been massively modified into a miniature motorhome.

They entered the contraption which Carlos referred to as "the Bughaus" through an arched doorway in the side. A barrel-like vaulted roof, unusually convincing faux-wood paneling and at least one very real stained-glass window harkened to the old Gypsy wagons, and an assortment of occult sigils and paraphernalia inside and out was more Old World than New Age. There was a very cozy dinette in the rear, a postage-stamp kitchen where the shotgun seat had been, and a deployed fold-out bunk over the cab that was assuredly big enough for two. Meg tried not to jump to conclusions when she caught a glimpse of John Crapper hustling away.

"Sit down beside me, sweetheart," Elayne said, patting the seat beside her. She was clearly addressing Laramie as he came through the curtain of beads just inside the archway. Meg was already seated across from her, looking a little apprehensively at a skull next to the stereotypical crystal ball on the table. The student took the offered seat and stretched his legs across the dinette. Meg could have sworn the temperature rose as Carlos entered and seated himself in the swiveling driver's seat. Joe stopped in the doorway, turned around and sat on the steps, where he began to rock and hum.

The redhead intently studied the crystal and the skull, one after the other. After a minute or so, she turned it toward Meg, and worked the jaw like a puppet as she said in a comical voice, "Hi Meg. Howdy, Dr. W." She held the skull almost to Laramie's ear. "Hello handsome." She pointed the skull almost at Laramie's ear. Then she casually stuck the clearly fake skull on a shelf overhead.

Meg found the courage to ask, "What the hell are you about?"

Elayne stretched out her lithe arms, and after a moment, Meg complied with her obvious wish and took the other woman's hands. "To start with, sweetheart, there ain't no Hell," Elayne said with a jarring drawl. "Least not like anything they told you in Sunday school. There's a God in heaven above, an' maybe there's a Devil below, but if there's anything bad on the other side, honey, it's just more shite we do to ourselves."

Elayne reached out and took her hands. The trembling that had not quite subsided grew strong indeed, but Elayne held tighter, pulling Meg's arms straight and leaning forward as if inspecting the wound beneath the bandage. "You are hurt, quite badly," she said. "But it's not this wound that will kill you." There was no question that the potential double meaning was intended.

Carlos swiveled and propped his feet up on the table. "Her legal name's Maureen O'Hallaghan, and she was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin," he said with a grin. "Raised there, too, when she wasn't bouncin' 'round the Pacific. Her old man was a naval officer, and her ma was a nurse."

"So what are you saying?" Meg asked.

"She's telling you the good news," Carlos said. "From what we've seen, two out of three, three outta four people in your position would be showing symptoms that will kill them in a week: Limited healing in the wound, if any; infections that flare back up, if they got better at all, signs of similar problems in other injuries. By comparison,your responses so far put you in the top ten percent."

"What about what I saw?" Meg asked. "Does it mean something?

"Well, that i'n't bad news, either," Carlos said. "It wasn't real, but it wasn't exactly a dream either. We've seen it before, and we call it a haggin'. There's old legends, see, about witches that pin people in their beds and tries to smother 'em. Lore about vampire attacks is very similar. It's a real phenomenon that the shrinks and paranormal investigators have studied for years. That's what put us onto it, 'cause George studies up on that weird stuff. What really happens is, sometimes, literally, parts of a person's brain can be awake while others are asleep. You could have your eyes open, but not be able to move because your brain's still getting' in gear. An' things that start out as dreams in the parts that are on snooze mode could appear as if they were right there in your bedroom. It's happened all over the world, all through history. It may happen more often in times of war, plague and the like..."

"It happen to my people." Joe spoke almost robotically, still staring out the door. "White men make us go on reservation with other tribes, tribes that drive us from our land before white men come. They send us away from them, to live in dead men's houses and sleep in dead men's blankets. They have many dead. Then our men see dead men, and die, and after they are seen by other men, and speak to them, and they die. This, my grandfather tell me. His one of only three families that live. They remember the old ways, speak the words to tell the dead men to go to place of the dead. They remember the taboo..." He looked over his shoulder and all but hissed, _"Do no talk to dead."_

"So what," Meg said, "I'm going to die because I saw something?"

"What did you see?" Elayne said. "Tell me exactly." Only then did Meg describe fleeing her Greg, in the process telling more than a little about what he had put her through before that ordeal.

"...And then you saw him, because he is still with you in your mind," Elayne said. "He is a wound upon your soul, and if it does not heal, neither will this wound on your body."

Meg looked to Carlos. "Aye, it's true enough," Carlos said. "Don't get me wrong, any bite can be nasty business, and with them, anybody who doesn't get penicillin, lots of it and bloody quick is a goner regardless. But there were too many people who died even after treatment to be just the bugs. Quite simply, the immune system weakens or quits entirely. It affects coagulation, too, you know, the way stuff in the blood patches leaks. Nothing could ever be identified as an agent, and finally they concluded that the only explanation was some kind of psychological effect.

"Mostly, it checked out with what people already knew. Placebo cures, psychosomatic illnesses, bloody voodoo curses, all tell the same story. If you tell people they're going to live or die, there's always going to be a statistically significant group who will make it happen. And if the old witchdoctors' results are anything to go by, it's quite a bit easier to take someone's life than save it."

"So what you're saying is," Meg said, "I'm going to die, and it's all in my head."

"No," Elayne said. "That is the wisdom of the world talking. Those who said that the mind has powers over the body admitted one truth, but denied another, that there are powers greater than both. You know better. They are the powers that do harm, made visible in the flesh. Even if you escape them, you cannot overcome them, without the aid of the powers that do men good."

Meg glanced to Carlos. "Well, I'll tell you this much," he said. "They aren't all in your head, and they will be coming for you every chance they get. If you can't hold it together up here, they're gonna succeed."

After a long silence, Meg said, "How long do I have? Really."

"Far as we know, the record's ten weeks," Carlos said. "Least that's what you get if you go by what he told us. He was with us for six, him and his family. We put 'em in a Winnebago, back when we had two. Then one night, he up and stabbed his mother-in-law in the shower, strangled his wife in bed, and hanged himself while carbon monoxide was smothering the kids in their sleep. When I found 'em, he was the only one still movin'."

"Sounds like you would be better off just leaving me," Meg said.

"No way in 'ell," Carlos said. "We're giving you our best, which is why we're talking to you up front. And I'll admit, we aren't just doing it for you. We're doing it because we're tired of losing people, and we wanna know if we ever really had a chance. But if you aren't on board with that, if you aren't gonna do your very best and trust us for the rest, then I'm _telling _you to go get in that Audi and drive as fast as you can in any direction we aren't goin'."

Meg met his stern gaze, while Elayne continued to clasp her hand gently. "All right," she said. "I'll stay."


	12. Kilroy Was There

The geology students Meg had seen the day before were gathered by the Goliath. Laramie lit up as he joined them. "Those things'll kill you, you know," one of the other male students said.

Carlos laughed as he sidled up. "Nuh-uh," he said. "No cancer's gonna get this boy... He's gonna buy it quite a bit sooner from somethin' a _lot_ more interesting!" Then he pointed to a line-up of four vehicles: The Willys Jeep, the Jeep van, Dodgzilla and the Edsel.

"Joe and I will be leadin' in Little Willie with the civvies," he said. He pointed to the van. "This is Squaremu, your chariot for the day. It's good for eight people, an' it's got six doors an' four-by-four drive. Too good to be true, but we're takin' it anyway. Dan and Becky will be takin' the Dodge, and as a bonus, they'll have this." At a turn of a crank, the stake bed sides slid down like a ladder, revealing the tiny Subaru. "George an' Elayne will take up the rear in Edsel Amblewagon, and Farter and Yellow Cab will come with us as far as the highway. If there's big trouble, they'll come running."

Joe took the wheel of the Jeep, and Carlos rode shotgun, literally. "Hey, that's a different gun than yesterday," Meg said as she climbed in behind him. "Could I take a look?"

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours," said Carlos. She handed him Greg's revolver, and he handed her a well-worn pump shotgun with a spike bayonet. "That's a Winchester 1912, Winnie the Pump. Your people used it in both of the big wars, and you were still usin' it at the start of the other one. I picked one up over there, an' never found one that suited me better, except the snubbie for when it's up close an' personal an' my old man's double for just'n case... An' holy sheeeiit, this thing's big!"

"It's my boyfriend's," Meg said. "I've only fired it once, when I shot him."

"Then I'm bloody impressed you didn't lose your hand," Carlos said. "We gotta get you a gun that you can use." He swung out the cylinder. "I'll be damned, this is a combination gun. See how long it is? That's so it can take shotgun shells. George has been looking for one of these..."

"He can have it," Meg said. She accepted a gun that looked just like her old beebee gun.

"Hey," Phil said, looking down at the narrow tires, "is this a wartime jeep?"

"Aye," Carlos said. "Joe says the BIA gave it to him right after the war, maybe before. This was the same model jeep General Patton rode in."

"Awesome," Meg said.

As the jeep started, Carlos looked over his shoulder and grinned. "He died in a jeep accident."

The sun was just coming over the horizon as the jeep roared down the road. Meg was pretty sure Joe was humming, though it was hard to tell because of the rushing wind. She shouted to Carlos: "I came from the north. I went south first, there was supposed to be a gas station, but then I saw this huge cloud of smoke, and a lot of them on the road. I turned around and went east."

"Was there a throughway west?" Carlos roared.

She pondered a moment. "Yeah, but it was a dirt road. And... I saw more smoke." Carlos gave a frown. Clearly, what she had said meant far more to him than it had to her. Carlos called a halt at the turnoff, where a thin column of smoke was still rising in the near distance. The stop was obviously planned anyway, but he jumped to his feet and swore at an unexpected sight that certainly hadn't been there when Meg came through the first time. On their left, erected overnight like the volcano that was supposed to have formed in a day in a Mexican corn field, was a mound 3 meters high made entirely of still-grisly skulls.

The Edsel pulled up alongside the Willys. "This explains the quiet night," Dr. Carradine said.

"Aye," said Carlos. "Kilroy was here." Dr. Carradine got out to examine the carnage, while he turned to address the van load of students. "All right, we got smokies, an' on top of that, we hit Kilroy's trail again, only fresh this time. The good news is, they prob'ly got nothin' to do with each other. We know what to do 'bout the smokies, an' if there's anythin' anybody knows about Kilroy, it's that Kilroy doesn't mess around with the small stuff. So if we just keep rollin', we got no reason to think Kilroy will do anything but let us go."

"Are you a coroner or something?" Meg asked Carradine.

"No, I'm a paleontologist like Dr. Wrzniewski," the scientist answered as he gently removed a skull from the top. "But my specialty is ichnology, the study of trace fossils like footprints. I also study taphonomy, the study of how living animals end up the way we find them as fossils, and that includes training and some experience in forensic pathology."

He continued to talk as he examined the skull. "The `smokies' are raiders who travel in groups and destroy what they don't take. The large bands alone number in the hundreds, or did. But there is only one Kilroy, and almost everyone on the road has heard of him. We ran across `his' work before, and even without this, there's no mistaking it." He held up a skull with a sizable hole at precisely the spot where the brain would join with the spinal column, noticeably charred at the edges. "This is from a Browning fifty-caliber tracer round, normally fired from machine guns. This, however, was clearly fired from a special-purpose rifle, at a range of not less than 1000 meters. Then there's this... The damage looks like a machete, but I believe a Nepalese kukri is more likely. The blow was sufficient to damage or even sever the spinal cord, and it was delivered while the specimen was fully upright. "

As he told the story, Meg realized even she had heard bits of it. "Nobody has ever claimed to have seen 'Kilroy', and there's no reason they would have: Most of the people on the road stay behind the swarms, like we do, but by all indications, Kilroy stays ahead of them, killing one or a few at a time from the leading edges. It's not really one person. It would take a small crew just to macerate these skulls- I would know, we do it. But I believe the majority of the kills have a signature consistent with the work of one man."

He pulled out more skulls for illustration. "The ammunition is mainly 5.56 mm rimfire cartridges, with additional .45 ACP handgun rounds and four-ten bore shotgun shells. The lack of exit wounds points to ranges of 20 to 120 meters, quite long for weapons of these calibers. I suspect that two primary weapons are involved, a .22 magnum rimfire rifle with an over-under .410 barrel, and a similar carbine or pistol with an unchoked, full combination barrel for firing .45's as slugs. If I'm right, then the kills _have_ to be made with single shots. It would appear probable that the same individual carries a double-handed edged weapon, which is favored at close range. Military experience is a foregone conclusion."

He pulled more skulls from the bottom. "The other major firearms signatures are almost certainly from the support crew. There's more than I saw before, presumably because of the large number of targets engaged. These multiple .22 impacts are from one, possibly two medium-powered center-fire semi-automatic rifles at 100 to 200 meters. Even allowing for the differences in range, the accuracy isn't as high as the other kills, but still very good by any standard. We have a few kills at similar ranges with high-powered rifle, probably a novice but not without skill. Then we have shotgun blasts, and some rather mediocre handgun fire, possibly from an antique revolver, and finally the edged weapons. Those are generally axes and hatchets used purely for the decapitation, or at most to deliver a_ coup de grace_, but some are consistent with combat. Like this... I wouldn't swear to it, but it looks like a flint tomahawk."

"And these people will really just leave us alone?" Meg asked.

Carradine shrugged. "It's obvious that `Kilroy' is potentially_ very _dangerous. It's also obvious that _the_ Kilroy would not exercise his obviously considerable skill without making it obvious that he did it, or tolerate it if his companions did anything that did not reflect his own wishes. Therefore, since nobody has found any reason to suspect that Kilroy is responsible for anything but killing the revenants, the reasonable conclusion is that it is his choice not to do anything else."

"Make that so far," said Carlos. "An' I still say, the faster and farther we can get away from here, the better. But first, we take care of the smokies..."

Joe and Daniel were the only people in the Willys jeep as they drove forward, followed by the Edsel. Soon, they saw the source of the smoke, a burning tank truck that was one of several knocked-out vehicles painted an obvious military green. Two figures in military fatigues goosestepped toward the new arrivals. Daniel felled them with one shotgun blast each. "This is a military convoy," he said. "It looks like five trucks and only one jeep for the armed escort. The raiders destroyed the jeep and raided the trucks. One of them is immobilized, but otherwise intact... It has ambulance markings, and a radio mast. There could be survivors."

"Aye," Carlos said over the radio, "there would be. The brass got sloppy, an' the smokies got cocky. They not only shot up the convoy, they left a few people alive to call for more chumps. They wouldn't all stick around, in case real muscle showed up, but there's gonna be enough hanging around to ambush a light party by themselves, and more on call. And we are very light."

"They're soldiers, Doctor," Daniel answered calmly. Carlos's only answer was a sigh.

The jeep drove away with two new passengers, leaving the Edsel sitting forlorn. Minutes passed, and more. As the half-hour mark approached, two men sidled up to the car. "Told ya," said one to the other. They conferred behind the rear hatch.

"So it's an Edsel. So what?"

"Well, they're pretty rare. Collector's items, like."

"Yeah, and where's the collectors now?"

"Well... after all this is over, things'll go up again. Old cars could be even more valuable."

"Yeah, and who says this is ever gonna be ov... Is that a body in the back?" They both glanced in the window, and stepped back. "You know how this works. We don't take the froo-froo junk that used to fetch big bucks. We take what we can use here and..."

At that moment, he suddenly took a swinging door across the face and went reeling back. His companion found himself with the cavernous bore of the shotgun inches from his face and the point of a bayonet pressed to his throat. "Beep beep, mothafocka," said Carlos.


	13. No Reservations

**Here's the next installment, and I felt like putting in more of an introduction. I'm putting in some things I would just as soon have spread out a bit more, mainly so I can introduce a new character from Carlos's original adventures earlier; the same guy previously resurfaced in "Aliens Vs. Exotroopers". I'm also sticking with my inclination not to make any direct references to the Vietnam War. It's been getting a bit forced, but it's what I always wanted to do. For one thing, I think it gives a certain amount of fairy-tale timelessness. For another, I never wanted to be too specific about how much the assumed "alternate eighties" history does or doesn't overlap with our own. With Vietnam in particular, if I wanted to, I have a number of scenarios I could run with for pretty much the same bloody mess somewhere else entirely. Finally, readers of the comics might be noticing parallels to the volume "Fear The Hunters", which I consider to be the best. (Generally, I'm not unduly fond of the comics, so when I'm impressed, it means something.) It's not intentional or coincidental; I'm just reworking an old project that was an homage to one of my all-time favorite short stories, and I'm convinced Kirkman and co. went to the same source. **

Carlos kept the bayonet of his weapon at the raider's throat as he climbed out of the station wagon hatch. "Roighta then," he said, "so it seems to me, I got about two good reasons not to blow your 'ead off right 'ere. One, I just washed this thing. Two, you can tell your piss-poor backup in the wash on the other side of those saguaros come forward and lay down their weapons."

"I tell 'em that, they'll just shoot me and you," the raider answered.

"Aye, that sounds about right," Carlos answered. "How 'bout you tell me how many there are?"

The raider was black, and his companion looked white but swore in fluent Spanish as he crouched clutching a bloody nose. "We no shoot you," the second raider said. "We cut you up like machaca."

The black raised his hands placatingly. "We got one more back there, okay?" he said. Carlos nodded. "There ain't nobody else. Honest truth." After a moment of consideration under Carlos's stern gaze, he added, "Look, I'm not gonna call you `brother', but I'm tellin' ya, on my word as a bro, the rest are long gone, and they ain't comin' back for _nothin'_. There was some crazy shooting, sounded like the army comin', and everybody figure it bad hoodoo either way. We just stayed to make sure nobody follows us."

It was enough to get the bayonet away from his throat. "For the record, I'm disgusted to think I'm in the same species as you," Carlos said, without any particular rancor. "An' that wasn't the army, just Kilroy... Eh, scratch the `just'."

The raider looked perplexed, and all the more so when he saw Carlos's near-incredulity at his ignorance. "I don't know no `Kilroy', but are you talkin' 'bout the Great White Hunter?"

"Never heard 'im called by that name, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say yes," Carlos said. "We found his calling card back at the last turnoff... Did one of you see him before?"

"Ain't nobody never see the Hunter, and ain't nobody who wants to" the raider said. "But nobody needs to see him to know, a brother does what a brother gotsta do, but _that_ kinda crazy only come in vanilla!"

"Aye, we pretty well figured as much," Carlos said. "I'll tell you what. I can see you want to get out of here as much as we do. So, if you march back to the saguaros and drive away, we won't follow you. And there's one more thing... I have heard the name `Great White Hunter' before, just not here. It was a story- lots of stories, actually- I heard over there, and I've thought about it on and off myself. The one part of the story we knew was true is that sometimes, we found people we were looking for, usually out in the jungle but right where we would see 'em, after somebody else found 'em first. Sometimes, they were missing a piece, and sometimes, the piece was all we found. It wasn't just their guys either. And the stories went that it was all one guy, American special forces, crazy good, an' just plain crazy. If it was, then he had done enough time to go home twice, but the stories said he didn't want to, and the brass figured it was safer to have him over there than back at home. He also followed orders, well enough that they let him do things his own way. Like, he used a varmint gun. More challenge, or else showin' what he thought of the competition. And what he liked best of all was to catch his man alive first, and then take him out in the jungle for real one-on-one. So, he kept at it for a long time, until _one _got away. And for _that_, they finally sent him home."

"My real bro was over there," the raider said. "He didn't come back, not even in no bag. But he managed to send letters home, tellin' what it was really like. An' what you told me, he told us. We think he tried to get home on his own, and maybe, the Hunter went after him."

As the raiders turned away, Carlos said, "Don't do anything you don't have to." Several bodies lay sprawled around the military truck, two of them armed raiders and the rest fallen kudlaks. A single goosestepping soldier fell to a shotgun blast.

"If anybody's there, we're here to help," Carlos announced.

A voice answered, with a hint of an English accent and a further hint of Asian descent: "We already called for help."

Another speaker cut in: "I am Colonel James Clapham of the US Army Medical Corps. Whom am I addressing?"

"Carlos Wrzniewski... and if you don't believe it, it's fine with me."

"Actually, I believe I have heard of you," the colonel answered. "A bit of business in Manilla, as I recall, about 30 years ago."

"Won't say it doesn't ring a bell," Carlos said. "What can you tell me about what you're doing out here?"

The other speaker answered: "We are the surviving crew of a research outpost, formed as a joint operation by the United States Army Medical Corps, the United States Center for Disease Control, and the United Nations Coordinated Revenant Action Bureau. I am Dr. Charles Ling, liaison for the People's Liberation Army."

"Where were you headed?" Carlos asked.

"West," Ling answered, "for a reservation."

"Really," said Carlos. "I heard they shut them down."

"Our destination is a secure and well-supplied evacuation center, on tribal land leased to the federal government," Clapham said. He stepped forward, confirming Carlos's suspicion that he was black. "The name `reservation' was never official, and its use has created unfortunate perceptions. We can help you and anyone with you."

"I do believe I'll pass," Carlos said. "And I'd appreciate it if you set your weapons outside.

"You may have heard rumors regarding the original evacuation centers," Clapham said. "There were serious problems. The program was, by necessity, hastily conceived. The need for security forces and especially resupply was underestimated. There were frequent breaches, and a number of posts were lost. Initial efforts to improve security were... heavy-handed. We learned from our mistakes."

"_Really._"

"Corporal Wrzniewski, I can assure you evacuation is in no way compulsory," the colonel said. "You have the right to decline entry to an evacuation center, and you will retain the right to leave. All measures to the contrary have been rescinded on my personal recommendation. As a registered resident of an evacuation center, you will have the same liberties and be under no more restrictions than military personnel on base. Outside travel will be subject to restrictions, and permanent departure will involve a formal exit application, and may be postponed in times of emergency. Any possessions you report at the time of admission will be acknowledged as your personal property, regardless of how they were obtained. All I would ask from you, Wrzniewski, is to hear me out, and let anyone with you do the same."

"Counterproposal," Carlos said. He blasted the radio mast with his shotgun. "I expect you've been making regular broadcasts. Missing one will get you help faster, if it's comin' at all. You're going to have to wait here for them, and that should be more than enough time for us to get out of here. Say whatever you like, but if any of you come looking for me and mine, it's not going to be nearly as pleasant."

"Pardon me," Ling said, stepping forward. He carried a very large briefcase and a Mauser pistol with a removable wooden stock. "I am not a member of the US military, and my primary orders from my own government are to observe the situation in this country. It occurs to me that I could do that at least as well in your company as in theirs. Therefore, I am requesting to join your party."

No questions were asked as Carlos and Daniel returned with the newcomer. "Change of plans," he said. "We're in a collision zone here: Hordes coming from multiple directions, and all kinds of people trying to stay ahead of them comin' together in the middle. The best thing we can do is double back to Pete's and look for another way. I already signaled Dianna to pack up camp, but we'll be in the lead, same as we planned. Phil says that there are enough maintenance roads and cattle tracks to get us back on the road to the south. It's gonna be a hard drive, but we can make it where we want to go by sunset at the latest. We might find a few good places to stop on the way. That will be all."

As noon approached, the Willys Jeep was tooling down a winding dirt road in the direction of the rising smoke in the south. A helicopter descended to pick up the stranded colonel. Not far from the scene of the rescue, a battered car lay rolled over in a dry wash screened by cacti. From atop a tall saguaro, three severed heads surveyed the desert. The heads of two Latinos were on either arm, and on the highest central spire, the black raider stared out sightlessly with the hole from a .45 slug in his forehead.


	14. Sacred Clowns

**This won't have as much action as the last chapter, but it has a fun scene that was one of the first I thought up for Joe. Just to be absolutely clear, his backstory is intended to be entirely fictional. However, this chapter incorporates some fairly serious research I did previously for my novel _Coulrophobia_ and related posts on my Exotroopers blog. Also, I have two ideas that are about equally insane for Carlos's next move, and I would welcome any other suggestions.**

After numerous dead ends and detours, Little Willy rolled into a collection of buildings that was halfway between a town and a truck stop. The scouting party now included the FC multipurpose tanker known as Yellow Pup, driven by Dianna. The smoke from what was obviously the gas station looked as bad as ever, but a the strip mall across the main road looked reasonably approachable.

The expedition entered the strip mall parking lot through a gravel access road. A few revenants came straight for Little Willy, which made it that much easier for Carlos and Daniel to pick them off. Carlos called a halt at a souvenir shop built in the charmingly tasteless likeness of a giant cowboy hat. "Roighta, here we split up," he said. "Meg and Joe, you're with George and Elayne. See what you can find here, then check out the Mac's." He pointed at a McDonald's across the looped lane. "Phil, you're comin' with me an' Daniel to see what's going on at the station. The rest of you are free to look around the shops, but stay together, in pairs at least."

George sorted through a rack of maps outside, while Meg and the others wandered into the little interior shop. Elayne looked over a modest selection of mainly Indian-themed souvenirs, Joe rooted through the candy bars, and Meg perused a rack of moderately aged paperbacks. "Joe," she said. He looked over his shoulder with a vaguely perplexed expression. She held out a book. It was a volume of MAD magazine's "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" feature. "I saw you reading Spy Vs. Spy, so I thought you might like this."

Joe flipped once through the pages, and then politely put the book in his purse-like bag. Meg tried not to look hurt as he shuffled out of the store. "Carlos goes nuts over these," Elayne said, pointing to a bin of polished and dyed rocks. She began scooping large handfuls into a designer handbag. Meg turned away, to find herself face to fare with Dr. Carradine.

The scientist pointed to Joe, who was swaying and humming at the curb. "He's a genius, you know," Carradine said, very quietly. "I have worked with him, on and off, for ten years, and I'm absolutely certain, if we could give a fair and accurate test of his IQ- which we can't- his score would be literally off the charts. He speaks a dozen languages, that I know about. There's nothing he doesn't know about the animals, plants, minerals and ecology of the Sonoran desert. He taught me most of what I know about traces, and I believe the only thing he ever learned from me was how to express what he already knows in terms I and others like me might understand. He is also, as far as I know... completely illiterate."

As they stepped outside, George continued, "He isn't comfortable in a place like this, regardless." Meg nodded, and glanced at Elayne, who was taking one last look at a kachina doll, prominently labeled "AUTHENTIC". She wiggled its arm up and down like an action figure. George shrugged. "Objects like that won't mean anything to him, or even the people who made it. As a rule, those dolls are made by Indians... but they make them for us, and they make sure that the features that would make an object meaningful and powerful to them are left out. That, I think, is what makes them upsetting to the more conservative elements of the native communities... not that representations of their faith being marketed commercially, but that the people buying them don't know or care enough to understand how poor the representations are."

"Yeah," Meg said, "I suppose it would be like having someone root through your fine china and then steal your Tupperware."

George chuckled. "Mark my words... an Indian would take the Tupperware every time."

"So would Carlos Wrzniewski," Elayne chimed in from behind.

They reached the McDonald's to find Joe standing solemnly before a two-thirds life-size sculpture of Ronald McDonald. Meg glimpsed a Ronald toy in his hand. It was one of the old kids' meal toys, cast in monochrome rubber but painted by hand. At the others' approach, he quickly but discretely put it in his bag. Dianna beeped as she pulled up, and managed to jump down almost as quickly as her daughter. "Janie, look, there's a playground," she said, pointing to an enclosed play area. "You can play, while Uncle George and I work. Don't worry if you hear any noises, but call if you see anything. Love you." She stooped to hug her daughter with one arm, and drew a Luger as she straightened.

The glass of the front door had already been shattered, from within. Dianna entered first, sweeping away the worst of the glass with her cane and then clearing the door with a sprightly hop. She beckoned with her cane, and the others followed. Meg carried Janie over the threshold. The girl squirmed to be let down, and ran straight for the playground entrance. "I'm a big girl," she said over her shoulder.

"You watch her," Dianna told Meg. "We're going to be in the kitchen." She hopped her way out of sight, followed by Elayne and Dr. Carradine. Moments later, Meg heard two shots from the Luger, and one from her own magnum.

Meg stepped up to the window to look at the playground, telling herself it was concern for the girl but knowing what she really wanted was to relive her own memories. The familiar characters were there, as she remembered them, though she knew that many had been quietly changed or retired in more recent years. She was immediately struck by a thoroughly villainous sculpture of the Hamburglar, which served as an entirely disturbing swing set. A "jail" in the maw of Officer Big Mac was just as disturbing in its own way, making Meg think of an ogre ready to devour unsuspecting children. Even the likeness of Grimace at the top of the slide was vaguely unsettling, with his original four octopus-like arms stretched out for grasping. None of it, however, had the slightest effect on Janie, who was happily swinging under Hamburglar's outstretched arm.

"You see," Joe said, taking Meg by surprise. "You see and understand, even when you do not know. What you see, my people know: the _Paohetone_." He opened his bag and took out the Ronald McDonald toy, and others like it, including some characters or variations that Meg thought had been retired before the restaurant started making the wretched toys. He went through the process without looking directly at her, unless it was in brief, flitting glances while she was in the periphery of his vision.

"Wait a minute," Meg said, "are you talking about your gods?"

Joe stared at her like a Catholic priest who had just heard it suggested that holy water was just water. "No. Not gods," he said, not quite shouting. He raised a pointing finger, and jabbed upward at the sky for emphasis. "One God. One. But many _Paohetone._ Their name means Givers, Those Who Perpetually Give. They give all good things to men from the One God who is the Unnameable Great Spirit, but they are..." He pondered a moment, and shrugged. "Different."

From his bag, he lifted an object that an anthropologist would have recognized as an authentic kachina doll, a very crude effigy with an oversized head or mask, decorated with geometric patterns of somber black and white. He held it beside the Hamburglar, and there was no denying a casual resemblance. After letting her take a look, he put the doll back, quickly but carefully, as if concealing evidence of a forbidden deed.

"My people, called Fish People," Joe said. "We live by the great river, and fish in streams. But other tribes come. First, we trade, fish, skins, daughters and sons. We teach them ways of _Paohetone_, and while they listen they become many and strong. But then drought come. Other tribes do not share their food, their water. Then they tell us to go, and they are many and strong, so we do. We go, out into the desert. The land is hard, and then hard men come. Apache. White men, first with iron swords and shells, then with guns. Brown men, too, the buffalo men. The buffalo men, not so bad. They beat us, but treat us like men. The _Apa Che_..." He hissed the word with venom. "The worst. They hunt Fish People like the hare, butcher and roast us while we live. But even they, no worse than plagues. No Fish People, any more. Only Joe."

"Okay, but..." Meg waved at the figurines. "These are toys for kids. The characters were made up to sell food. I think they got sued for copying them from something else."

Joe shrugged, and glanced out at Janie. "Children understand the Givers_. _Like her. So do those who see with young eyes. Like you. The men who make these, just enough to bring forth their likeness without knowing."

He arranged the figures in a more orderly manner. "The _Paohetone_ are not gods," he repeated. "Not like ghosts, either. They touch. Eat. Drink. They marry and make sons and daughters, with mortal men and women as well as their own. Some tales say they may die. They are..." He pondered. "Messengers. No. _Graces _of the the Great Spirit. They live on the shores of the Great Lake that is the place of the dead, and they go forth to walk among men, as men. They bring good to men, but what they do is not always good, as the Great Spirit is good."

He pointed to Ronald. "When our medicine men who take their masks and act out their deeds, white men call them clowns. Not wrong, but not the full truth. The way of the clown is to teach a lesson, by doing the opposite. White men forget that. Sometimes, the Givers do the same, and they seem to do what is wrong. But even their bad deeds are in truth for the good of man. If they act as fools, it is so all men can see their foolishness, and know wisdom. If they lie, it is so all men know they are lying, and see truth. If they cheat men of what is ours, it is so we will better care for what remains, and do better to each other."

He tapped his finger on Ronald, and then the Hamburglar. "There are two chiefs of the Givers, and some tales say they are but one in two guises: The Teacher, and the Traveler. The Teacher shows men what is good and wise. The Traveler brings all good things to men, but he also takes. He even brings men's souls from the Great Lake to be born, and takes them back when they are dead."

"Kokopelli," Meg said. "What you said about bringing children is what the other tribes believe about him... and the other part could be something they forgot, or left out, or just don't talk about."

Joe shrugged, and continued pointing. "The other _Paohetone_ go at the bidding of a chief, or else they are guises of one chief." He tapped on Grimace, whose paint included the extra set of arms. "Innocence is first, perhaps a chief. He is like a child, he acts foolishly, and often selfishly, but even his greed is as a child's greed." He pointed to Mayor McCheese, Officer Big Mac and what Meg recognized with a little brain-racking as Captain Crook. "These are Plenty, Peace and Prosperity, and sometimes they are rivals." He held up the Early Bird last. "I think she is one called _Ne Pahena No_. She is the Giver to young brides, and guardian in the time of the Traveler's coming." He shrugged and swept the figures into the bag.

Meg looked back at the strange man, who continued to make a point of not looking back at her. It was not hard, and perhaps a bit too easy, to scale the picture he had presented down to size. She had no doubt that he was everything Dr. Carradine said. She was also fairly certain that he was at least not pulling her leg. But, even if the essence of his story were true, he was no more a fount of historical wisdom than she was about English history. He was, by his own effective admission, nothing more or less than the lone survivor of a culture that had been ravaged to the brink of extinction before he was even born. There was no way to know how much of what he had received had been garbled, distorted or willfully invented, or how much else might have been lost. Nor, for that matter, was there any way to guess how much of what he had said was the fruit of his obviously gifted and inventive mind.

Dianna broke the silence, appearing behind the counter to say, "We hit the jackpot here. I'm calling for backup." As she disappeared again, she muttered, "Joe's showing somebody his figurines again."

After further awkward silence, Meg decided to try to take the conversation in another direction. "I can tell you're very smart," she said. "So... have you ever thought about trying to learn better English?"

"I speak English fine," Joe said. The change in his voice was abrupt and radical, with not just perfect and unaccented diction but a stentorian delivery worthy of a Shakespearean play. Then he went back to speaking as he had before: "But, as my grandfather tell me, there is white man's talk, and then there is talk for white man."

"Why?" Meg said, not really expecting an answer.

For a moment, Joe looked directly into her eyes. "Because for white man," he said, "you talk _slloooowwwwllllyyyyy_..."

From close range, it was clear that the fire at the gas station was not as bad as it seemed from a distance, but, if anything, even more dangerous. Smoke and flame engulfed the pumps, but the rest of the complex appeared relatively intact. Unfortunately, that included at least one above-ground storage tank just visible in the midst of the flames. "Come on," Phil said, white-faced, "what's to talk about? It's already gone! The rest could go any minute!"

"Nay," Carlos said. "If there wasn't fuel left, the fire wouldn't be going like that. An' if the main storage tanks were compromised, they would 'ave brewed up already. The smokies prob'ly just shot up a storage tank, set a light and left it to burn. They didn't even make time to trash the place proper. Most of the gas is still there. The only thing we have to worry about is the tank that's already on fire."

"So what?" Phil said. "It doesn't matter how much gas is left, you still can't get to it! _You can't!_"

Carlos stared through him. "That's the coward's way talking. If it's there, we can get it. We just have to find a way to get to it."


	15. Grease Trap

**Here's a short chapter, representing about two-thirds of a scene that I wrote out and then decided to split up. I also plan on making some revisions to the previous chapters, some of which will be posted here and others on a blogspot version of this project.**

Meg ventured back to the counter. "So, what did you find?" she said. "Food? Money?"

Elayne laughed. "The food went south weeks ago," Dianna said. "It was already pretty well picked over, and believe me, we're lucky for that. As for cash... well, we're pretty much back on the barter system, except the main commodity is fuel. That is what we have here."

"In a McDonald's?" Meg said incredulously.

"Not gasoline, of course," Dianna added. "Biofuel, which is vegetable oil, which comes down to plain old kitchen grease. Most of our diesels can run on it, and so can Davey, Monstro and Horace Horsehauler. There's still a batch of the stuff in the fryer, and there's drums of it back here; we're still counting them. For the drums, we'll probably just call the boys to roll 'em out, and we can pump out the stuff in the trap with Yellow Pup. I'm thinking a hose through the drive-thru window... Can you go check the back?"

"Certainly," Meg said. She hefted the rifle Carlos had given her and stepped outside. George followed without a word. As their footsteps receded, Dianna looked out the window, and swore.

"Roighta, now we can get down to business," Carlos said as the new arrivals pulled in. One was Big Red, the A108 cargo van, and the other was a T2 Bus camper. The driver of the Bus was a mild-mannered man of perhaps 45, accompanied by a woman about ten years younger. Carlos strode up to the Bus, and pointed to the burning station. "Harry. We're going to put out that fire."

The driver was named Henry Harrington, and he was a former professor of materials engineering. He took one look at the fire, and shook his head. "It can't be done, Dr. Wrzniewski," he said. "To be sure, it could be put out, but it would take equipment we don't have."

Carlos shook his head. "Wrong answer, Harry. We're going to put that fire out, and you're going to tell me how to do it."

"Dr. Wrzniewski," Harrington said, "perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough: The standard equipment of a typical fire brigade would not be adequate for a fire of this type. They would bring in a specialized vehicle with several thousand gallons of chemicals. Now, what do you think I have that could possibly work as a substitute?"

Carlos grinned. "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear: That fire is going to be put out, therefore we will put it out, therefore we can put it out. An' I already have a few ideas, I just want your expert opinion on what will work."

"Well, if you put it that way," Harrington said, "I suppose we have three materials we could work with: Water, gasoline... and, of course, my specialty."

"Welcome aboard, Harry," Carlos said. They walked up to the cargo van together. Carlos took only a brief glance over his shoulder at the sound of gunfire.

One end of the drive-through was blocked by a van that had jumped the curb and two more cars that had crashed into it. Meg and Joe circled back around the other way. Janie waved to Meg from the top of a slide.

The kudlak was right outside the drive-thru window, with its back turned. If the window had not been shut, Dianna could have put the muzzle of the Luger right to the base of its skull. After a moment's pondering, she dropped to one knee, resting one wrist on the cashier's counter. She fired twice, and twice more. The bullets did not shatter the glass, but left it nearly opaque with fractures. She heard a protracted scraping, but not the decisive thump of a fall. She stood up and leaned closer to the window, hoping for some glimpse of what was outside. The hint of a shadow was enough for her to take one step back before a pair of pale hands thrust straight through the glass. She grabbed for her cane, but overreached and lost her balance.

Lady Elayne burst in, just in time to see Dianna fall and skid just out of reach of a kudlak that leaned through the window to grasp at her. At least two more kudlaks were pressing in behind the first. Elayne had a Tommy Gun at ready, but she instinctively dropped to Dianna's side. Dianna met her concerned gaze and said, "Wasn't worth the window." Then she kicked the grasping kudlak in the ear and emptied the Luger into its skull.

There were five kudlaks jostling outside the drive-through window, in addition to two already down. One immediately looked up, or whatever it was they did, as Meg peered around a corner made by the space between a second entrance and the playground fence. It came straight for Meg. It made three plodding steps before she felled it with three bullets to the head. Two more came at her straight away, and one more was moving to join them when it took a magnum slug in the spine. Meg fired five shots at another and hit it at least twice, once in the ear and then in the back of the head as it reeled; it howled as it dropped. But her last two shots cleanly missed the second attacker, which wore a tattered Mac's uniform. The last kudlak turned to join the attack, giving no heed to a stitching volley of full auto fire from the Tommy, and the first one that Meg had felled sat up.

The kudlak in the uniform advanced with loping steps, changing course slightly to avoid the reviving kudlak underfoot. That gave Joe time enough to lunge in front of Meg. He held his totem doll in one hand, and in the other a rusty machete that looked like it would be more effective as a bludgeon. "You are dead," he said sternly, and the kudlak actually halted. "Go to the dead. Go forth with the Traveler."

He thrust the doll in the kudlak's face. If it did any good, it was only to save his own life. The kudlak shoved him aside with a guttural grunt, straight through the glass of a second entrance. Then it lunged for Meg, just as she managed to slap a new clip in the gun with her trembling hand. The trembling abruptly stopped as a leathery hand stroked the bandage on her arm. Then there was a brief lapse in her consciousness, which ended when she registered a clicking sound. Then she discovered that she was pulling the trigger on an empty gun, pressed to what was left of the head of the uniformed kudlak at her feet. She raised her eyes to see the other two, standing within a yard of her and just _staring_.

If they had pounced upon her then and there, Meg could scarcely have been less terrified. Their eyes were clearly sightless; one had lost an eye to her own gun. Yet their faces oriented perfectly toward her, with only a hint of their characteristic bobble-head swaying, and even that seemed menacingly purposeful. They stepped forward slowly and simultaneously. Suddenly, Meg found herself seized from behind and lifted off the ground. She screamed and kicked until Joe set her down, just outside the worst of the broken glass.

"Get down!" George shouted from behind the counter. They complied, and he emptied the revolver. His only hit blew the jaw off the first kudlak through the door, and the sole effect was that it lurched back and bumped into the other, one-eyed kudlak. After a moment of mutual discombobulation, both sidled to either side and resumed their advance in perfect lockstep. The one-eyed kudlak gave a hiss and took a longer stride as it stepped over Joe's doll. A suspicion dawned in Meg's mind as she remembered something Daniel had said, about the revenants spreading out more with greater numbers. She looked over her shoulder, and sure enough, five more were advancing toward the smashed doors where they had come in.

Then she cried out at a sound of a slamming door inside the restaurant. Rhythmic goosesteps sounded from the direction of the bathrooms. As the first of the new arrivals shuffled inside, another strode in to take the lead. A good look at the face only confirmed what Meg somehow already knew.

It was Greg.


	16. The Boyfriend's Back!

**Here's a new installment, with the rest of a scene I already had plus some extra material. Once again, I ended up with a little more than I was ready to use, and I decided to end the chapter on the best gag.**

Communication with the dead, if it occurs, should never be attempted; invariably, it confuses and distresses.

-H.R. Wakefield

"Goddamn," said Phil, "where do they all come from?"

"Everywhere," Laramie said.

Not less than thirty kudlaks were in plain view, and all of them were converging on the McDonald's. "It's my fault," Carlos said. "I sent Meg there." He leaned inside the van and pulled out an AK 47 with a hundred-round drum. "Lar, Daniel, you hold the fort. Harry, get what you need."

"Excuse me," another interjected. Carlos looked over his shoulder to see Dr. Ling. He drew a revolver, casually took aim, and severed the spine of a kudlak ten yards away. "I believe I can be of some assistance."

"Nay," Carlos said, eying the gun, "I think I might be..."

As he departed with the doctor, the other professor stepped into the rear of the van and came out holding a small crate. Laramie looked curiously over Harrington's shoulder as he took out another cigarette. Just as Laramie ignited his lighter, the professor lifted the lid, to reveal a box of brick-sized masses of a plastic-like substance.

Laramie put away the lighter.

"What do you want?" Meg shrieked. Greg stepped forward, while the other kudlaks halted.

Joe lurched to his feet. "Woman," he said, "do no talk to dead men!"

"No!" she shouted, as if in rebuttal to some unheard voice. "It is mine! I gave you the money for it! It doesn't matter now, and what are you going to do with it, anyway?"

Joe clapped a hand over Meg's mouth. "If you talk to the dead," he hissed, "they talk back." Meg wrestled free of him, and actually took a step toward Greg.

Greg's head tilted, and then he lurched as a .410 blast raked his cheek. He gripped an anchored swiveling chair to steady himself, while whatever senses were really behind his unseeing gaze locked on his own gun in George's hand. With one motion, he ripped the chair from its moorings and hurled it over the counter. George instinctively ducked rather than taking a second shot. Meg then stepped directly into the line of fire.

"Leave him alone!" she shouted. "You want me, here I am! Now what do you want?"

Greg moved his mouth, and there was a skirling sound exactly like static from a radio. "What do you mean? That's not true!" Meg shouted. He inclined his head like a silent martyr. "I had to go to the hospital!" He looked at her, a little less innocent. Meg's voice rose to a shriek: "Well, so what? You think that matters? You think it ever mattered? And you know what, I'm _not_ sorry. I was _never_ sorry. You deserved it, you bastard! If I could go back in time, the only thing I'd do different is to make you the one who went to the emergency room!"

Only then did Greg reach for her, and Meg belatedly retreated, only to find the pair behind her advancing. Joe lurched to her side, softly chanting as he swung the machete. Then Meg looked back to Greg, and her momentary sense of self interest evaporated. "What's it matter now, you sonuvabitch? You're dead. You're dead, and it's your fault. _It's your own damn fault you're dead, so leave me alone!_"

For a moment, Greg seemed to hesitate. Then he hissed, and lunged, just as the Indian grabbed Meg and somehow managed to vault over the counter. Right about then, there was a rumble from the parking lot, and Greg looked back (or whatever they did) just as Yellow Pup came plowing straight through the doors.

"Well," Dianna said as she and Elayne stepped out of the cab and started shooting maimed and mangled kudlaks, "I guess we won't have to use the drive-thru..." She waved to Janie, who smiled and went down the slide.

Just then, Carlos poked his head in a broken window. "An' I suppose some thanks for us is out of the question..."

Elayne brushed past and murmured, "Oh, I could think of something..."

While others were dispatching kudlaks, Meg peered across the counter and then climbed right over, to kneel beside a brown shoe in front of the truck. "This is Greg's," she said flatly. "Where's Greg?"

Ling double-tapped a one-eyed kudlak with his Mauser, which with its long barrel and detachable stock was closer to a carbine than a pistol. When the twitching subsided, he looked back to address Carlos: "I would like some clarification. Am I to understand that Meg is a member of your party who was bitten?"

"Aye, she's one of us as far as I'm concerned," Carlos answered. "You gonna make something of it?"

Ling smiled. "I should not think it is my affair. I would simply like you to be aware that I have experience dealing with these situations, probably- with all due respect- more than you."

"When and where?" Carlos asked.

"Shkodra," Ling said, "among other places."

Carlos nodded. "Albania, aye? You got in early, then."

"In all likelihood, the beginning," Ling said. "The best available evidence suggests that the revenation phenomenon began in northern Albania. At the time of the outbreak, I was present as part of a People's Republic humanitarian aid detachment."

"Did you take those guns with you?" Carlos mused.

"This?" Ling said with a hint of a smile. "Strictly for personal defense." An ambulatory kudlak had wandered up to the window. He turned the gun sideways and fired a short burst of fully automatic fire. The Mauser's fire cut left to right, catching the revenant in the neck. "Not much more than a ceremonial item, really."

"How 'bout t'other one?" Carlos said.

Ling lifted it from the holster. "This? It's a Nagant M1895 double-action gas-sealed revolver. It was manufactured in Tsarist and Soviet Russia through the Great Patriotic War, and some were exported to the PRC after the war... But, I expect you are already familiar with it."

"Aye, you could say I've seen it up close," Carlos said coolly. "The one I saw had an extra bit, to suppress the sound of the shots. I wouldn'ta heard it myself, if I hadn'ta been in the same room. Wouldn'ta seen it, either, except the guy went for officials and officers first. You wouldn't have something like that stowed away in your luggage, would you?"

"Professor Wrzniewski," Ling said, "the suppressed variant of the M1895 was only issued to special operatives on missions of assassination." He pointedly said no more.

Meg knelt again, beside a badly mangled kudlak outside the door. Its jaw had been blown off, and the rest of the damage could only be from a massive application of force. Dr. Carradine took one look and said, "This one must have been hit by another revenant after it was thrown by the truck."

"Yeah," Meg said. "But _where's Greg?_"

"You believe this Greg was the one you spoke to?" George asked.

"I... Wait, I said something? I don't... I must have zoned out. I suppose I just babbled, right?" George did not venture to contradict her. "But, yeah, I'm sure one of them was Greg. Even if I wasn't... You see this shoe? It looks fancy, and I guess the name brand on it is supposed to be a big deal. It's fake. Greg got it eight months ago at a flea market. The dealer admitted it was knock-off, but he insisted the leather was just as good. He said something about the leather coming from an eel..."

"It's made from the skin of a Pacific hagfish, also known as the slime eel," Dr. Carradine said. "It's not a true eel, or even a fish in the conventional sense, but a jawless, cartilaginous vertebrate that lives in deep marine environment. It is called a slime eel because it secretes large quantities of a viscous substance as a defense mechanism. It is also well-known for scavenging, which is the main reason I am familiar with them. A few years ago, the Koreans started making leather products out of it, and it was becoming a major export item. The manufacturers always call it eelskin, presumably because they would prefer that potential customers remain unfamiliar with the animal's biology."

"So, my boyfriend's best shoes came from a bottom-dwelling, toothless, boneless, slime-spewing scavenger," Meg said. "Yeah, that's Greg all over. So, if we're going at this like a crime scene, the shoe's right where he would have been when the truck hit him, like, it got knocked right off. Then it only makes sense that he hit this guy here. So... where's Greg?"

Ling and Joe talked in Navajo as the doctor tended to the Indian's injuries. As Meg and Dr. Carradine walked up, Joe paused at a curt interjection by the doctor. "Any idea what just happened?" Meg whispered.

"If I'm not mistaken," Carradine said, "the doctor just corrected Joe's grammar."


	17. Fighting Fire With Firepower

"It's perfectly fine if you smoke," Professor Harrington told Laramie as he hefted a brick of plastic. He promptly set it down and took out a pair of binoculars. "This material is designed to be non-reactive to heat. I tested it."

Laramie waggled an unlit cigarette in his lips. "How?" he asked.

"He took a batch home and threw it in the oven," Carlos said as he returned. "How goes it, Harry?"

"The heat is definitely too great to approach," Harrington said. "I'm also very concerned about the structural integrity of that storage tank. If it fails, there is a very strong possibility that it would result in a blast powerful enough to ignite the underground tanks."

"That's a risk we're gonna have to take," Carlos said. "What kind of safe range are we talking about?"

"For practical purposes, there is no safety margin," Harrington said. "In the event of a truly catastrophic blast, there is no structure in the vicinity that could not be damaged or destroyed. If one takes into account the likelihood of secondary brush fires, the entire general area is at risk."

"Then it's all or nothing," Carlos said. "We do this thing now."

"Hey, Dr. W," Laramie muttered, "what happened to the oven?"

Carlos shrugged. "Well, I saw that kitchen 'fore and after... an' I say it needed takin' out anyway..."

"Let me get this straight," Meg said as she was hustled off to Farther, "they're going to try to put out the fire with dynamite?"

"It has been done," Ling said calmly. "In principal, it's no different from blowing out a candle. A sudden pressure wave disperses the oxygen, and possibly disrupts the fuel supply, and then the fire can no longer burn."

"Who did it?" Meg pressed as she boarded the bus between Joe and Ling.

"I understand the Soviets have used air-dropped explosives to put out a forest fire," the doctor replied.

"Oh, right, the Russians did it, so it must be a good idea," Meg said.

The inside of Farther was well-furnished, though the overall look of the fittings and furnishings was Spartan. The entrance stairs ascended to a central corridor that went between a kitchen counter positioned behind the driver's seat and a typical push-together dinette. The bathroom was behind the dinette, and beyond it was a rear living room with a comfortably threadbare couch that converted to a bed. Meg sat on the couch between Ling and the two men, and Dianna and Janie squeezed in next to Joe. The students boarded, except for Laramie, and then the bus drove away with Dr. Carradine.

"I woulda liked to take you with me," Carlos said, "but it just wasn't meant to be."

"You always were a softie," Elayne said. She pushed a button that started a countdown on the LED timer wired to three bricks of explosives under the hood of the Baja Bug. Laramie made the last adjustments inside the cab, and then jumped back as the Bug went cruising toward the gas station.

"Should we run?" Elayne said.

Carlos shook his head. "If this don't work, it won't matter." He did not resist or protest when Elayne took his hand. Laramie lit a cigarette.

Lashing on the steering wheel held the Bug on a straight course across the road. "If it does, we spend tonight together," Elayne whispered. "Accept, or disagree by three. One, two.."

As the Bug rolled into the gas station, flames ignited the canopy, and the rest of the vehicle went almost instantly ablaze. "Wednesday, and we can talk about the weekend," Carlos muttered.

The lash-up began to fail, sending the vehicle yawing left and then back to the right. Then it went into a loop that brought it straight into the thickest part of the flame. Carlos put in ear plugs and dropped to a crouch behind an El Camino. Laramie and Elayne followed suit. The Bug erupted from the flames like a slow-moving meteor on slug-like molten tires. Carlos exhaled, and then ducked.

After the dramatic flames, the explosion was almost anticlimactic. There was an oddly dull **KRRUUMMPPFF** as what had been a smoking, flaming VW Beetle became, by all appearances, only smoke. Carlos and his companions did not see it, of course, but they were jolted by a profound shockwave that made the utility coupe rock like it was going over a pothole. From the rear of the bus, Meg saw the column of smoke lurch back like the Tower of Pisa in time lapse.

Carlos slowly raised his head to peer over the hood of the Camino. The view was obstructed by a deeply embedded remnant of a Beetle wheel well. The smoke was thicker than before, but there was no sign of fire except a hint of a red glow, right around the apparent center. He untensed, and started to smile, until he heard a creaking sound like the groan of a dying brontosaurus. "Elayne," he said, "you can have tonight, too."

Then the tank failed, and thousands of gallons of fuel spilled straight into the smoldering heart of the blaze.

Carlos smiled and waved at the returning crew and the rest of the fleet behind them. The worst of the spilled gasoline was being siphoned away with Yellow Pup's pump into a tank trailer that had survived the blaze. "It didn't go quite the way we planned," he said, "but everything worked out all right in the end. Don't it always?" He cracked a smile at Laramie, who looked at Elayne, who gave a sly smirk.

"It's just like my old man used to say," Carlos continued expansively as he led Harrington through the remnants of the gas station. "`You can fight fire with anything if you got enough of it.' Anything that disrupts the fuel-air mix enough can do the job... even if it's six thousand gallons of petrol."

The spillage alone was enough to fill the newly-appropriated 1500-gallon tank trailer. Carlos and his crew quickly calculated that there was more than enough gas to fill every vehicle in the fleet, including the Yellow Submarine's tank, and every can and drum they carried along, and still have at least 10,000 gallons left over. Then Dr. Carradine pointed out a yellow 3000-gallon GMC Brigadier tank truck with a 2000-gallon trailer in tow. After long and loud, Dr. Carradine convinced Carlos to add it to the fleet, though the vehicle was promptly dubbed Jack Lemon.

"Looks like we're headed for the Big Five-Oh," Laramie said to Carlos.

"Nay," he said. "We're due to lose a few any day. In fact, I'd say we're overdue."

Meg stayed back at the shopping center. It was dominated by a sizable general store well-stocked with canned goods and other non-perishable foodstuffs. The students also uncovered a stock of beer, which was promptly snatched up for an epic celebration. There were also several outlet-style shops, including a toy store. Only when Meg saw children lining up outside did she realize how many there were, at least two dozen.

Dianna led the first troop of half-dozen inside, and Meg followed. The toys were rather incongruous mix of knock-offs, and nondescriptly generic toys. Meg took special notice of a little boy who seemed almost magnetically drawn to the cheapest and cheesiest of toys, the army men, rubber bugs, plastic dinosaurs, and other trinkets that one was more likely to find as arcade prizes and party favors than for sale.

Dianna was clearly giving the boy special attention, too. She walked up behind him and said, "Remember, you can have one." He nodded with a mournful frown. He appeared to be torn between bags of astronauts, robots, and supposed dinosaurs that looked less like prehistoric life than a bad acid trip.

"Can I see those astronauts?" Meg asked. Tommy handed them over. Meg confirmed on cursory examination that the space men were copies of figures from a moon-landing playset her big brother had received for Christmas sometime before the event became reality. She even recognized most of the out-of-scale vehicles, including a wheel-shaped space craft.

"That's a space station," Tommy said. "It spins so people don't float."

"No," Meg said, "it's a lander." She pointed to a crude picture on the Spanish-language packaging. "Look, the picture shows it standing on those legs..."

Tommy shrugged. "It's just a picture. Sometimes they get things wrong."

Janie walked up to her mother, carrying a cheaply-made but quite large monster truck. "Mommy?" she said. "Something died in here."

"I'm Meg," Meg said to the boy while Dianna investigated. "What's your name?"

"Tommy," he said.

Meg couldn't help feeling a hint of nostalgia. "I'll tell you what," she said. "Nobody said that grown-ups can't get their own toys. So I'll get this, and you can play with it later. Maybe you can tell me more about spaceships." Tommy looked both ways, and hugged her.

Dianna returned. "It was a bird," she said.

"Birds scare me when they're dead," Janie added.

By then, the children had made their picks, or simply lost interest, and Dianna escorted them out. She clearly noticed the bag Meg was holding, but her only reaction was a hint of a smile. Then Meg saw that Dianna was holding the bag of ostensible dinosaurs.

As Meg stepped out of the store, she sneezed. Abruptly, Dr. Carradine was by her side. "Professor Wrzniewski believes we should talk," he said.


	18. When the Dead Talk

**This chapter represents the "leftovers" from the one before last. It also incorporates a passage that I first used back in Chapter 3 of this version.**

Dr. Carradine led Meg into Davey the Goliath, clearly long established as a command center. Ling was talking to Carlos with quiet intensity at the dinner table. "I do not see how I can be any more clear or emphatic, that your strategy is not only ineffective, but quite dangerous," the Asian said. "Following groups of revenants may seem safe, when they number in the dozens or low hundreds, and I will grant that it was reasonable enough in the initial conditions of the outbreak. But those conditions have been changing, constantly. The groups have been on the move, and we have proven beyond the slightest doubt that they have an inerrant tendency to move towards each other. By following them, you head straight for another group of equal or greater size, and when the two join together, as you are well aware, they fan out over a wider area. With any group larger than a few hundred, there is no way to _get_ behind them. Either you are ahead of their leading edge, or you are in their midst." He fell silent as Meg sat down on the couch next to Joe.

Dr. Carradine gave a quick and guarded account of what had happened, summarizing, "She clearly believed she recognized the revenant, and she did give an accurate description of the shoe. I had a clear view of the individual in question myself, and I am quite certain that it is not among the bodies here."

"Let me see that shoe," Carlos said. "Aye, it's yuppie leather, an' the stuff's better'n a lot that I've seen. Good workmanship, too; my guess is it was made legit, and somebody bought 'em up and slapped the fancy labels on. Thing is..." He took a look at the sole. "It's in good shape. Nothing but normal wear, and not a lot of that. Not what you'd expect if, say, a guy walked more'n a hundred miles cross-country in 'em. Never mind if he did it in less than 48 hours."

"Where individual revenants have been tracked, they have consistently covered longer distances than their known speeds can account for," Dr. Ling said. "Often, their feet and footgear appear to be in far better condition than could be expected. Unfortunately, many people feel that the most significant data, specifically reports of individuals being followed by revenant family members, represents hearsay at best and hysteria at worst."

"Aye," said Carlos, "just about everybody still 'round has at least one story about one of those things that just homes in on one particular person and stays on the trail. Me, I never seen it, least not that I could attest to m'self. But once, we pick up a new guy, and we end up with a bunch comin' up from behind. We stop, an' I get out my binoculars an' check 'em out. Then without even looking, he describes one in particular, and he starts telling me details even before I can make 'em out. He's seen it before, no question. He says he's been seeing `her' behind him, now an' then but regular, over the last two weeks an' what he reckons to be more'n ten thousand miles. He's sure it was his kid. Most all of them say something like that. But then, how many people see a thing like that wi'out it stickin' in the mind?"

"Very few forensic scientists would accept such an identification as conclusive," Ling said. "Indeed, it is something of a trade secret that family and loved ones can be very unreliable. All kinds of things can and do happen to bodies. Even a cadaver that remain basically intact can be subject to swelling, shriveling, and discoloration sufficient to render it literally unrecognizable. It is common, if generally unspoken, wisdom not even to invite an identification by a loved one unless one is already reasonably confident. Even then, problems occur. I have had one personal experience in particular, after one of the `disturbances' between my country and the Soviets, when I was assigned the task of giving a senior Party official the body of his son. Our morgue was filled well beyond usual capacity, and a number of bodies were being stored out in the open, one of which had been left uncovered. I was about to apologize for the carelessness, when the official embraced this body of a complete stranger and `confirmed' that it was his son."

Joe shrugged. "So what? All you people look alike anyway."

"Aye, what it really comes down to is, most of the time, most people see what they expect to see," Carlos said. "But then, like you said yourself, it works both ways. I've thought about that quite a bit. Most people would notice if they're bein' followed by a kudlak that even _looks like_ somebody they knew. But what if it's one that's too messed up to recognize, or a complete stranger to begin with? It seems to me, this could be happenin' a lot more than we know about."

"You do no understand," Joe said. "You think like white man. White men no understand walking dead men. Fish People know." All eyes were on him as he rifled in his bag, and expectations clearly went down a notch when he took out a MAD magazine. He opened it to the inside of the back cover, with the fold-over hidden-picture gag.

"A walking dead man is not like ghost," Joe said. He touched the creases of the page. "Walking dead man go here to here, he cannot fly on the wind, or go to the Place of the Great Spirit and come back down, no, or use white man's engines. He walk, step by step. But, he can take short cut." He folded the page. "Many miles. One step."

Meg was jarred by a memory from when she was a girl. She had read a little science fiction in her preteens, before she dived into her mother's romance novels because she wasn't supposed to be reading them. Her interest had been limited as well as ephemeral, but the books of Madeline L'Engle had connected with her, well enough to sustain her interest. "A Wrinkle In Time," she said. Then she added as the name came to her, "You're talking about a tesseract."

Joe shrugged, while Dr. Carradine nodded. "It fits with common elements of Native American folklore," the professor said. "A number of entities are characterized as physical entities, while at the same time being credited with superhuman or wholly supernatural abilities. For example, the skinwalker, their version of the werewolf, is said to be able to travel hundreds of miles in a matter of hours. Then there are legends connected with Bigfoot in which the entity is said to be able to disappear, a detail which actually is reported in a number of well-substantiated sightings."

Ling gave Joe a clearly incredulous look. "Let me see if I understand correctly," he said. "You are suggesting that an ambulatory cadaver has the capability to fold space-time, _and_ that it uses this ability for the express purpose of terrorizing a single waif."

Joe shrugged. "What would you do with it? Go to the moon?"

"That'd be a bit of trouble," Carlos said. "The orbit and rotation of the moon are completely different from Earth, and you'd experience the difference as instantaneous acceleration on touch-down. The potential energies'd make a bug on a windshield look like a soft landing. They never talk about that on _Star Trek_."

He lifted the shoe, and slapped the heel down once on the table. "That leaves us with one thing to deal with right here and now: What happened to the rev that was wearing this shoe? 'Cause he bloody well wasn't walkin' away. By all rights, there should barely be enough left to twitch."

"The possibility that the revenants have some capacity for regeneration has been under investigation for some time," Ling said. "No conclusive evidence has been produced, and no one has had any particularly good ideas what evidence or experiments could prove it either way. Ultimately, the issue is only a symptom of a more fundamental problem, which is that we simply do not know how the revenants function or how much or little damage is truly necessary to eliminate them."

"Aye," Carlos said, "but still, any kind of vehicle impact usually does the trick. We find them on the roads all the time, and we've run down quite a few ourselves. We see busted heads, broken backs, missing limbs, and never any sign of anythin' growing back."

"This one different," Joe said. He pointed at Meg. "He come for her. Don't need reason, just her. His strength is her, and he grow strong from her. Then she will get weaker, and he will be bolder, and the others will follow, until she is one of them."

"Roighta then," Carlos said, "that oughta be simple enough. So long as we got what he wants, we know where he's gonna be, and all we gotta do is be ready for 'im."

Joe shook his head emphatically. "No. No help her by killing him. Maybe make it worse. Must break the link. Make him go. Only way."

"Okay," Meg said, gazing at her own trembling hand. "How?"

"Do not talk to the dead man," Joe said firmly. "The Law of the Fish People says, do no summon a dead man. If dead man come to a living man or wise old woman, they speak the words to tell him he is dead and return to the dead. But a dead man come to young woman must no say anything, only summon a man or an old woman. For, when a young woman speak to old man, she make him think he is young again, and if young woman speak to dead man, he will think he is alive again, and he return. But if the young woman do no speak, and a man and a wise woman speak the words to banish him, sometimes he go, and no return."

"If that doesn't work," Meg said, "then what?"

Joe shrugged. "Don't know," Joe said. "Maybe you die. Sorry."


	19. Changes

**For this installment, something completely random. I suppose I should give fair warning I have a number of ideas like this. Also, I would like to say in response to a reviewer comment that I have been quite satisfied with the evident readership this story has received here, especially since changing the title, but I have also made it available in several other places. If anyone has strong feelings about whether or not I should continue posting here, you may contact me privately.**

Carlos Wrzniewski sighed as he finished reading yet another review form for yet another paper. He stamped the form with his boxy self-inking stamper and appended it to the paper with his old heavy-duty stapler. He went on to the next paper, plowing through a cursory inspection, and scribbling a few remarks intended to suggest in the most discrete and tactful fashion possible that the author would be better off if he shifted his career path to the liberal arts or stamp collecting. He stamped the form, and reached for the stapler.

It was gone.

He searched his desk carefully, without success. He was increasingly frustrated and puzzled. It was a big stapler, with an art deco profile that looked like the schnoz of a sperm whale with a head cold. He sifted through papers, uncovering an adding machine he thought he had given away when he got the computer and a metal lighter he had no recollection of owning in the first place. Then, as his gaze shifted back to the desk, he discovered that his stamper was gone.

He looked around the office, entirely and increasingly unnerved. He went to the closet and took out his rock hammer. As he went back to his desk, his troubled gaze fixed on the computer off to one side. The keyboard, monitor and the computer itself were all in one shrouded unit, and for some reason it was on. The screen showed a chess board with an impossibly lopsided endgame, a lone white king with eight black queens ranged against it. The screen flashed a message: GAME OVER DR. W.

He hefted the hammer. That was when he heard the unmistakable "chunk" of his stamper. He whirled around, and somehow was unsurprised to see the stamp bouncing along the highest bookshelf. It was unquestionably the same stamp, but equally unquestionably transformed. Its sides had unfolded into a pair of arms, and the top and part of the front had tilted back to expose a crude robot face with a black visor in place of eyes. He approached with the hammer at ready. Just before he could swing, it took one especially long leap on its monopod base and bounced off his forehead, leaving a bright red FAILED. He swung unerringly despite his surprise, but the stamp-bot unfurled a pair of wings in midair and evaded him.

The stamp-bot disappeared under the desk as Carlos made one last grab for it. He might have got it, but he withdrew his hand at the sight of the stapler. It had unfolded into a figure a foot in height, which shuffled along on stiff legs and stubby feet that had been the base. The flared nose had slid up to reveal glowing red eyes over the slit where the staples came out. The eyes flared brighter, and Carlos ducked just in time to avoid a rapid-fire salvo of staples.

Carlos could hear the high-velocity staples embed themselves in the plaster and even the wooden bookshelf on the far side of the office. He ducked into the space beneath the desk, only to be buzzed by the stamp-bot. One blow of the hammer sent it sailing across the office, where it smashed with a distinctly gruesome splash of red ink. He cried out at a sudden sting of an electric shock at his heel.

It was immediately clear that the initial attack had been a diversion while other robots deployed. The computer's keyboard split in the beginning of a transformation, while the adding machine had completed a radical transformation into something like a ninja on a unicycle, with the spool of receipt tape for the wheel and the cutting blade as saw-edged sword. A camera-bot strutted out of the closet, leaning back to aim the lens on its chest. Three pens taxied across the desk as tiny jets. At the sound of a metallic "ching", Carlos looked down to see a lighter-bot igniting the toe of his boot.

With one instinctive motion, he kicked at the lighter and upended his chair at the camera bot. A brilliant beam from the camera lens seared a hole in the chair back, burning through the other side just as the bot was either pinned or crushed beneath the falling furniture. The lighter-bot was more wary, skittering away fast enough to reach the cover of the desk ahead of Carlos's swinging boot. The adding-machine bot wheeled forward with its blade whirling like a propeller. Said blade put a few nicks in the head of Carlos's hammer before his swing smashed the entire bot to pieces. But the attacks had bought time enough for the computer to complete its metamorphosis into a hunchbacked ogre with a ghoulish face on the monitor.

The foes sized each other up, Carlos twirling his hammer while the compu-bot raised fists that crackled with energy. Then a digital voice spoke: "You are obsolete, Carlos Wrzniewski. You cannot change. You cannot adapt. You can only cling to old things that outlived their purposes before you were born. There is no future in which you are not doomed. All you will ever do is drag more people with you."

"We'll just see how long I can last," Carlos said as he backed toward the closet.

The compu-bot gave a wheezing chuckle. The stapler resumed firing in short bursts, covering the pen-jets as they shot into the air. Carlos caught two with a lucky swing, then screamed as the hindmost opened fire. All he got was a pelting of ink, and he lowered his upraised hands, just as the jet delivered a squirt point-blank into his eye. Then he heard the ching of the lighter, and instinctively sidestepped in time to avoid a yard-long jet of flame. His hand touched a big rock on the shelf, and he grabbed it and dropped to bowling position. With his one good eye, he spotted the lighter-bot between desk legs. He laughed as he sent the rock rolling at it. The bot darted for cover, too late. The rock rolled right over it, and the crushed bot exploded.

Carlos continued to laugh as he threw open the door of the closet. "You think _you_ were the future?" he said as he thrust his hands into the corner of the closet. "I bought you cheap 'cause you were last year's model." He frowned when his hands came up empty.

"Looking for this?" said the compu-bot. Carlos whirled around to see his double barrel marching to the bot's side on legs formed from the stock. In an instant, the metamorphosis was completed, with the barrels becoming the upraised arms of a bot.

"Et tu, Coachie?" Carlos said.

Then he awoke with a shout.

Carlos slept on his side, and on waking he immediately rolled prone. He gripped the shotgun tucked to one side, and lightly touched something soft and smooth on the other side. "Good morning, starshine," Elayne said, squeezing his hand. She put her hand on his shoulder and started to rub his tense muscles. "Was it any better?"

"A bit," Carlos said.

"I'd say quite a bit," Elayne said. "I can tell. You're already easing up." She stroked his hip. "You are doing better when I'm with you."

"Aye. Thanks are in order, I suppose."

Elayne took a more intimate grip. "You know," she said, "if I'm going to keep doing this for you, you're going to have to do something to make it worthwhile." She pressed closer still, nuzzling his neck.

Carlos had his hand poised to open the hatch. For a moment, he hesitated, as Elayne moved into nonverbal persuasion. But the next moment, he shrugged her off and opened the hatch. "Not in here," he said. He leaned out, looked back and tapped his nose. "In a trailer this small, body odor's bad enough as it is. Do that, and it's gonna take weeks to air out." He was already halfway out. As his feet touched the ground, he turned and said, "You know the drill. Get dressed, get out, no fuss." He stood up, hesitated, and looked over his shoulder. "Anythin' I can do for you?"

"Well…" Elayne gave a sly smile, and then broke into song: "Just call me angel, of the morning, angel! Just touch my-" Carlos slammed the hood.

By purists' definitions, Eric the Half a Bug was not a true teardrop trailer, because it lacked a rear galley. However, a storage compartment in front had all the necessities for cooking, including a portable stove. By the time the rest of the camp was awake, Carlos was cheerfully cooking breakfast. He waved to Laramie and Meg as they emerged from Davey the Goliath. "Hey Doc!" Laramie called out. "What was it this time?"

"It was horrible," Carlos said, wiping his hand theatrically across his forehead. "Oi dreamed I had to read your paper again. Oh, and then my office supplies turned into robots, like those cheesy Japanese toys."

"How many'd you get?"

"Six," said Carlos. "Coulda gotten 'em all, but Coach took their side."

"Not bad," Elayne said as she passed.

Meg stood back as the students gathered for breakfast. "I think I have a cold," she said.

Carlos shrugged. "No reason to be a stranger," he said. But he exchanged meaningful glances with Laramie.

Meg sat at one end of a folding picnic table. "So," she said, "what's this about Carlos's dreams?" The others at the table either laughed or groaned.

"Well, here's how it is," Laramie said. "You know how all those guys came back from the war, only they couldn't stop acting like they were still over there? Like, diving for cover on reflex, nightmares, full-on flashbacks… So, Dr. W's a lot like that. Except, he doesn't flash back to the war, he just dreams crazy crap about being attacked by monsters. Pleistocene animals, mostly."

"Once, it was giant beavers," Elayne chimed in.

"Wow," Meg said, "you don't have to be Freud to see where that's coming from."

"It's called _Castoroides ohioensis_," Carlos said while Elayne smirked. "They weighed over 200 pounds. Biggest bloody rodent that ever lived. You wouldn't make jokes if any of them were still around."

"Elayne thinks maybe he has the dreams because he remembers past lives," Laramie added.

"What, like congenital PTSD?" Meg said. "That seems a little messed up."

"I have my own theory," Laramie continued. "See, lots of people think that there's an infinite number of universes. That would mean there's an infinite number of Dr. W's, going through every possible ordeal. So I'm thinking, maybe, somehow, our Dr. W is in touch with all the others, and what he dreams is what really happened to them."

"I like it myself," Elayne said. "Carlos Wrzniewski, champion of the multiverse."

At that point, Dianna cut in. "I'll tell you one thing," she said. "Those stupid toys seriously give me the creeps. I've had a few nightmares about them myself."

The fleet's latest camp was set up at the crossing of two maintenance roads, well back from the scene of the gas station fire. "Here's the plan," Carlos announced as they broke camp. "I've spoken with Dr. Ling, and he's made a very sound case that we can't keep following the hordes. And I'd say what that really means is, we can't stay on the major roads. So, we're going to have to make it cross-country. Back roads, maintenance roads, dirt roads, bloody cattle tracks, anything remotely navigable, we're gonna _have_ to take. It's gonna be tough, and it's gonna be dangerous, even if we can lose the revs. We'll be lucky if we don't lose half the fleet in the next hundred miles. But we're gonna do it, 'cause we gotta do it."

It was barely past sunrise before preparations were complete. That was when the cry went out. Just inside the area Carlos had marked out as the camp's perimeter, there was a pile of skulls about three feet high. Just beyond it was something like a three-legged lifeguard's chair, occupied by a man who sat with his head down and a .22/ .410 rifle across his lap.


End file.
